Appologies for the multiple edit.. Spell checker obviously turned off.. will look into it
Too much marketing talk and that includes their white paper.
No talk of the protocol, or how the thing works at a Techinal level.
No analysis of cost of running vs micro payments so people can calculate their break even point.
Seriously without knowing how this works how is anyone supposed to figure out if it will scale or not. Which for a project like this is a huge question.
Double dipping ahoy pay for software use + pay for server time.
Too many buzz words not enough details. This looks like some start-up hoping to leverage buzz and community effort resources to make themselves a unicorn and a ton of money.
All I see here is an attempt to return to the bad old days of Terminals and Paying $$$/min for server time. Trust me it sucked. Its what PC's fixed. I'd much rather give my cycles to something like Folding@home Seti@home or something like that, then help these guys try to get rich off of my hardware/power/bandwidth.
Ok realized that was probably overly harsh. Let me start again.
Although an interesting idea I'm put off of it by three things:
- A lack of clear technical documentation and too much marketing speak
- Too much focus on the money, too little on community
- And what seems to me the exploitation of other peoples resources for monetary gain.
Let me tackle these one by each.
Lack of Technical documentation:
Without clear technical documentation on how this is all supposed to work I have now sensible way to evaluate it. Saying things like P2P, Decentralized, sharing enonomy, Etc tell me little or nothing. Their claim of it being "Secure" because of a VM completely assumes I'm not going to mess with the VM. Which would be trivial for many people to do.
Claiming that a P2P system
“guarantees decentralization and scalability”
is utter nonsense without numbers and protocol documentation to back it up. I've seen many P2P system that failed miserably to scale at all.
Too much focus on Money, Too little on Community
This is probably a slightly more personal one. I can own that I'm very community oriented. That I see the "Internet" as a global commons that should be accessible to all regardless of geograpy or finances. I'm still of the Belief that every computer should have the unrestricted ability to become a server if it so chooses.
What these people are proposing especially when they say:
“GOLEM IS THE NEW WAY THE INTERNET WILL WORK ”
(my first reaction was "pffft... decided that all on your own did ya.")
It is hard not to think that they envision a return to the bad old days of terminals and paying $$$/minute for server time. When I see the economic double dipping of charge for the software and charge for the CPU time. It definitely seems like that.
Completely missing is how this kind of thing (where it free) could empower people in remote or poor places to do massive computing. Wouldn't it be fantastic is a student at a small school in Mongolia had access to massive distributed computing power. Or Doctors working in remote places, or, or , or.. For me the power of such a system would be the benifit my spare cycles could offer the world. Not to enrich me but to enrich all of us.
Tied to this is the third thing:
Exploiting other peoples resources for monetary gain:
Going back to the lack of facts and figures for a moment. How is a prospective "provider" supposed to calculate their break-even point and thus know how much to charge without a breakdown of the expected bandwidth/CPU/electricty/etc this thing will eat? FB, GGL, etal might be able to just throw their space cycles at it because They are probably paying a flat rate for the electric for their server farms and banbwidth. This also means they could easily low ball any independants out of the market and make a bit of coin on their spare cycles. A win for them.. useless for the little guy.
To me all these people want to do is lock the Internet behind a huge IaaS, PaaS, paywall that they can profit on without out having to layout capital for the hardware. Nice for them. bad for everyone else.
So The question is.. Why..
without clear documentation showing me that this thing wont eat my entire internet, melt my CPU, and slow my computer to a useless brick would I choose to use it?
without any costing would I risk ending up spending more for bandwidth/power/wear and tear on hardware then I'll ever make?
would I put any time, effort, support into a system that clearly want to paywall and monetize what should be an open and equally accessible resource? Remember this is what these folks think is "THE NEW WAY THE INTERNET WILL WORK ". Not My internet. not now, not ever.
One last pet peeve. The whole "Sharing Economy" refernece. This isn't sharing. It's buying and selling. "providers" sell their cycles "Requesters" buy them. No sharing in site.