Hi everyone,
i've seen that there is an other challenger of "Decentralized Supercomputer": iagon.
What do you think about it? Do you think that xel can still have its role in the market?
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.