Building a decentralized supercomputer onchain
Let‘s instad have a thought experiment: We want to create a decentralized supercomputer, both on Ethereum and on BSV. Let‘s say we have a 60mb program to calculate 1gb of climate data.
Ethereum
On Ethereum it is impossible to put 1gb of climate data onchain. This is the capacity of about one week. It might be possible to push 60mb of program data onchain, but this requires a heavy refacturing of the scripts, will cost a lot of Gas and might cause several security risks.
If you try to do the operations onchain, you will fastly reach the limits. Executing the supercomputer operations will cost heavy amounts of Gas, while you only get a tiny power capacity, as the operation is done by every single node. It will not work very well.
Instead of creating the supercomputer onchain, you can create a marketplace for supercomputing onchain. This is approximately what Golem does. You create a smart contract, which tries to wrap up a complex logic of business scenarios to enable people to trustlessly trade supercomputer power on a decentralized marketplace. While such a contract will still cost a lot of Gas – it is relatively complicated for Ethereum – you still need a centralized third party to share data and tasks and to allow the involved actors to access the system.
Bitcoin SV
Now, how can it be done on BSV? First, you can put the files to process onchain – 1gb is not that much of data for BSV, Ryan X. Charles already uploaded 1.4gb of pictures. So you can do with the 60mb calculating instructions. Not as a smart contract for other nodes, but just as a string. All data you use is stringed: Nodes do not need to execute it, but they can.
Then you create an onchain website, giving users access to some kind of marketplace. This allows to access and produce onchain data: Identities or pseudonym of bidders, askers and maybe moderators; every step of a trade cycle – offers, acceptance, delivery, payment, review. It is not a shared computer, but a shared filesystem.
That‘s it, basically. You can share vast amounts of data and scripts, create the data items needed to run a supercomputing marketplace and process deliveries and payments without the need of a centralized third party website. Multisig transactions protected by a notary or moderator, can be used to secure the payments.
Sure, the supercomputing is something for the future. BSV just started its metanet enterprise. It‘s not ready. For example, processing multisigs on onchain sites is currently hardly doable in a userfriendly way.
But in general – it is possible. With this method you can basically build everything. While Ethereum struggles with making expensive zero knowledge proofs (zkSnark) compatible to onchain computing, people in BSV are already working on toolsets like onchain SSH.
A new paradigm