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Comment by logicallee | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if anyone thought of making a distributed operating system where 1-2 million people could all run a NINTENDO console or something else extremely primitive - but in way that they KNOW no one is pulling any shenanigans.

Can you imagine how cool it would be if a million or, say, a hundred million people joined forces to do what a $60 mobile phone can do?

This is absolutely the future. No doubt about it. No one can ever conceivably come up with a paradigm as cool as this level of redundancy. And on top of all of this, it even works. (Not as designed, because 51% of miners may be controlled by one entity, but in practice it totally works.)

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sounds like Ethereum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum

"Ethereum is an open-source, public, blockchain-based distributed computing platform featuring smart contract (scripting) functionality. It provides a decentralized virtual machine, the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). This virtual machine can execute Turing-complete scripts using an international network of public nodes and a token called ether. Gas, an internal transaction pricing mechanism, is used to prevent spam on the network and allocate resources proportionally to the incentive offered by the request"

Unrelated, I remember an experiment on Twitch, where hundreds of viewers controlled/played Pokémon Yellow (Gameboy emulator) live on Twitch via chat commands like "left", "right". It more or less worked out fine, but was rather slow progress.

> Unrelated, I remember an experiment on Twitch, where hundreds of viewers controlled/played Pokémon Yellow (Gameboy emulator) live on Twitch via chat commands like "left", "right". It more or less worked out fine, but was rather slow progress.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitch_Plays_Pok%C3%A9mon

except twitch plays pokemon was meant for entertainment. the purposeless waste of resources on bitcoin is a cult, believed to enlighten the world.

That is what Golem is building (https://golem.network/). Decentralized compute power that is a global P2P network of PCs. The platform will allow software developers to put their software on top as long as its approved (e.g. to make sure it's not malicious).

BOINC pioneered this sort of shared computation to do massively data parallel experiments for astrophysics research in the early 00s. I think they still do.

These days, I think the hardware investment is much lower than the software+infrastructure+social investment of running your experiment on BOINC.

The Golem team (https://golem.network/) got their inspiration from BOINC. But now more people will have incentive to share their compute power because they will be paid.

IIRC the focus of these kinds of infrastructures has shifted towards protein folding [1] which could IMO prove more useful than astrophysics.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_folding

For anyone reading this later: the above was sarcastic but I left off the /s. I don't think blockchains are that great of a fundamental primitive. Though, independent of application, they were extemely novel.

you don't need a blockchain for computations; only for transferring value from buyer to seller.

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