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Comment by StreamBright | Hacker News Reader

From her new project: https://golem.network/

>> Ethereum-based transaction system

Is this going to be fast enough for their use cases?

Sounds like FileCoin for CPU rental. Could be legit, especially as they're not creating their own token for this purpose. Nonetheless, by using Ethereum they're still committing to burning a lot of electricity - would be interesting to know if it's more or less power than used in the actual computation they're selling.

It's worth mentioning Ethereum has been planning to switch to proof-of-stake (PoS) mining instead fo proof-of-work (Pow) for a long while now. They even have a "time bomb" built into their PoW algorithm they have to "reset" every once in a while because these original plans were more aggressive.

I'm not necessarily in favor of PoS, but it does "solve" the electricity concerns you are raising.

Also insert here long winded explanation of how much power is used by existing banking infrastructure.

Ether is planning on moving to proof-of-stake rather than proof-of-work some time in 2019, which should help with the power consumption.

https://www.mangoresearch.co/ethereum-roadmap-update/

GNT is the ERC-20 token they use. Golem had an ICO last year. It would be really challenging to figure out how much power is used by a particular ERC-20 token given that mining is performed on the whole chain, not a token bybtoken basis.

>Could be legit, especially as they're not creating their own token for this purpose.

Maybe I am confusing them for another project, but I am pretty sure they do have a token model.

They mention it's based on ethereum, not currently their own token.

They have an ERC-20 token called GNT, it's a smart contract that runs on the eth network.

Edit, wrong parent reply, but I hope their market isn't entirely memecoin based, should let resources decide on the payments they want to take

Golem uses Intel SGX (specifically a modified Graphene-SGX libraryOS) for trusted execution if anybody is interested [1] https://software.intel.com/sgx

However, it's worth noting that SGX was affected by Foreshadow.

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