Eve: The world scale computer & the Blockchain

[Pascal Bergmann]

Vitalik Buterin tweeted about decentralization recently:

(...) "You spin up your own server" is far less user-friendly than "here's a magic cloud that data gets stored in, you don't have to care about servers ever again". It's the latter that's in high demand.
Source: https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1004204762667945986?s=19

Eve also had the concept of a "world computer", as everything would have been "just data" to store:

"Eve: The world scale computer (designs, prototypes)
The next step is to show how Eve allows us to get rid of the 1970's notion of a computer and embrace a distributed world. Along the way, maybe we could get something like Moore's law back without forcing people to understand Paxos."
From: http://witheve.com/philosophy/

I guess Eve and the Blockchain would've been a match made in heaven and it would've also been way more accessible than e.g. Solidity.

Has there been a rough idea about how to do decentralized computation in Eve?

[Zubair Quraishi]

I agree, I think that Eve and the blockchain would have been a match made in heaven, as code and data could have been stored among many nodes and then tracked via a public blockchain

[ovi...@upstack.co]

dfinity

[Korede Aderele]

been compiling a series of thoughts on what this could look like. primary influences for my thoughts are:

- Wasm-based virtualization from chrome's v8 isolates as is being used with cloudflare workers (https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloud-computing-without-containers/?hH), particularly the optimizations that come with shared contexts

- Runtime and distributed computing primitives similar to Unison's (unisonweb.com); their idea for nameless hashing of computation and dependencies could be really useful for both dynamic transfer/deployment of computation (as mentioned http://unisonweb.org/2015-05-07/about.html) as well as context-based optimizations -- since dependencies are hashed with computations, programs with more common dependencies could gain more from sharing isolate contexts

- TrueBit and Filecoin present some pretty good incentive structures, verification and threat mitigation mechanisms for a "blockchain-based distributed computer" (see respective whitepapers)

[Korede Aderele]

There's also some super interesting implications for version control that come with the whole dependency hashing thing, some of these implications further necessitate the rethinking of IDEs that's being done in projects like Eve, Unison, Lamdu (and, of course, the prescient work from the Smalltalk folks)

[Pascal Bergmann]

I'm happy to read about some new ideas here. As Vitalik steps back in Ethereum, maybe he's interested in thinking about projects like Eve in context of Blockchains.

[Liam Proven]

This is a reply to a message from before I joined the list, so I lack
context. Thus, just some general remarks:

On Mon, 26 Nov 2018 at 20:38, Korede Aderele <kade...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> been compiling a series of thoughts on what this could look like. primary influences for my thoughts are:
> - Wasm-based virtualization

Argh. No! Wasm is low-level stuff. Want to do something new and
interesting? Look for _higher_ levels, not lower.

> from chrome's v8 isolates as is being used with cloudflare workers

Don't worry about running the thing. That comes later. It doesn't need
to be factored in at the start.

> - Runtime and distributed computing primitives similar to Unison's

See above.

> - TrueBit and Filecoin present some pretty good incentive structures, verification and threat mitigation mechanisms for a "blockchain-based distributed computer"

To quote myself: "if it's got the word 'blockchain' in it, it's bollocks".

Cryptocurrencies are a giant scam. Avoid. There's a reason Bitcoin was
nicknamed "Dunning-Krugerrands".

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