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Comment by ddtaylor | Hacker News Reader

Very interesting to see her joining Golem. I have been following them for many years and I'm excited to see what they produce, but they seem to have been in a holding pattern for a while unable to produce progress in some ways. I think she'll probably help solve that.

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I'm not fond of the economics of Golem. I suspect they will not be able to compete with centralized solutions, as they have to support all sorts of redundancy to make things trustless. They could make it more federated, but then how is that better than AWS? And why do you need a token at all?

Most of those complaints could be said about cryptocurrency in general, such as Bitcoin, which by technical standards isn't very "efficient" compared to a centralized ledger.

Just as there are a lot of people out there that are interested in banking but not interested in playing at the scale of being a bank I think there are a lot of people interested in contributing to a decentralized computing infrastructure without having to create a large dedicated data center.

When you use AWS you're subjected to AWS pricing and AWS servers. A more open network where everyone can offer computing power has the potential to reduce the lock-in effect that all the big cloud vendors force upon their customers.

The initial goal of Golem was to be so efficient that the best way for big cloud vendors to offer their services would be through the Golem platform. That's obviously a moonshot, but it helps us to see what the Golem team is aiming for.

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