Golem (www.golem.network) is building a general-purpose distributed computation platform where people who need compute power pay using cryptocurrency. And developers can build software to run on it (and get paid when it's used).
I vouched for your comment, as it's factually correct near as I can tell. I've been interested in the project, especially since Joanna Rutkowska joined them.
This might work well with Golem (www.golem.network) because they've implemented WASM which opens up many possibilities. I haven't found a cheaper way to render.
Yes, this is the idea. Enclave technology should improve over time, whether it's SGX or something else. And Golem is working with Intel, Texas A&M and others in creating an environment called Graphene (https://grapheneproject.io/) where applications can easily be run on SGX.
Enclave defeating technology will improve over time as well. Things like scanners and lasers and emi detectors get better and better just as technologies for hiding from them do.
It's not one of those ICO scams. Maybe you'd prefer their GitHub page in which the team has written over 100,000 lines of code. https://github.com/golemfactory/golem.
It's a marketplace so you name your own price and at the moment, it's used for CGI rendering, but next week there are more use cases being added, specifically WASM.
What's great along with Blender, is the availability of very very inexpensive rendering using https://golemgrid.com/. It's name your own price and can be had for 1/10th the cost of using a render farm.
You're right--I could have made my point differently. I just pulled up the Ramses Github and didn't see much activity whereas I knew of a different repository with thousands of lines of working code.
What's the benefit over throwing it at a cloud provider?
There's an active downside of random people being able to see your data, not to mention randomly sized boxes and shoddy network connections (which is a big deal for the microservices which they are touting as a use case, and also for big data. Data transfer is one of the slowest bits of data science). Running a web service on random devices where keys, sessions, whatever end up in memory on some box would be a security nightmare. The government doesn't need a back door if all they need to do is host some compute nodes.
Is it just that for some tasks that are very parallel and not sensitive it might end up cheaper?
Technically, these problems also exist with cloud providers, but we more or less trust them because of their reputation.
Perhaps a digitally signed NDA could be verified by a smart contract? Then, to prove the NDA was breached, a quick court case (standardized NDA) leads to a published ruling that the digital contract can check.
Combine the clear guidelines of a standard NDA with a proper court adjudicating the more complex disputes, and you have the foundation for a strong reputation system for Eth-cloud services. Is reputation already a thing in the Ethereum network?
I mean, they exist in much less of a form. It's trusting 1 entity vs literally everybody, including people intent on being bad actors. You also have to have less trust because you're operating in a more or less known environment.
The network bandwidth will be a real problem regardless. Latency too. Single digit millisecond scale database roundtrips are awesome. 50-100ms would be just terrible. If that's a fundamental limitation then applications can only get worse, not really better.
Overall, what fundamental problem are these solving? If they aren't solving a real pain point with a worthwhile cost, uptake is going to be nonexistent.
