Our company has nothing to do with cryptocurrencies! We’re building HVM, a massively parallel functional runtime developed in Rust, based on a new model of computation (Interaction Nets), that is outperforming Haskell’s compiler in some cases by an order of magnitude. I believe it is a groundbreaking technology that has the potential to change the tech industry by making massive parallelism accessible. It is the first “automatic parallelization” project with remarkable real-world success and numbers to back it up.
Yes, we’re building a p2p computer too, but it is just a secondary product we made mostly to showoff the performance of the HVM. Specifically, we replaced Ethereum’s EVM by the HVM, and managed to hit ~100x increased throughput for many opcodes. But that’s just it, a p2p virtual machine. It isn’t cryptocurrency. It doesn’t even have a currency! I share the hate, but not every p2p project is a cryptocurrency. Torrent and DNS existed way before Bitcoin, and are fundamental to the internet as we know it!
That said, this webpage is a draft and we’re due to some massive rework of it, because it is clearly not showing our intents properly, so that’s not your fault. We need to communicate better.
I would be very interested a p2p computer. I think having a shared computer with state is a key building block for a lot of services. I’m also interested in replicating the experience/vibe of having a shared machine that multiple (trusted) people can SSH into. No interest in having money involved here.
Exactly! That’s the spirit/point of our chain: you do NOT need a cryptocurrency to have a worldwide shared computer, and such a thing would be so useful as a technological primitive that projects can rely on, just like internet protocols and whatnot. But I’m almost regretting developing it because people immediately jump to the conclusion that we’re a crypto project, even though the chain isn’t nearly as important as HVM and don’t even have a currency!
If you don’t want people to think it’s a cryptocurrency thing, you badly need to redesign the marketing. The very first thing I see when I look at this is a picture of a chain. You’ve already turned off everyone who dislikes cryptocurrency at this point.
The fact that there’s text on that next page that says it’s not a cryptocurrency thing doesn’t help you much because you already created a bad first impression and some readers have already left by this point.
A second problem I have is this:
It is PoW-based, forever. In fact, PoS isn’t even possible, since there is no built-in currency.
This is one of the specific aspects of cryptocurrencies that has made people dislike them.
Could you not cut out the PoW waste entirely by having some TTPs sign blocks, acting like notaries?
HVM is the first real-world efficient implementation of Interaction Nets! We took this new model of computation, which was invented in 1997, developed a memory-efficient representation for it, called Symmetric Interaction Calculus, and, based on that, we implemented the High-order Virtual Machine (HVM), a massively parallel runtime. Right now it only targets functional languages, and it is already outperforming Haskell’s GHC by 9.2x in some cases (!), but it isn’t limited to FP.
I do like the idea that it doesn’t have a token, but a framework for deployed apps to easily offer micro-tokens to miners. It effectively turns it into distributed Patreon.
What I’m missing in the design is that it “obviously” depends on somebody setting up an exchange capable of dealing with an unlimited number of possible tokens, and some way of automatically discovering and registering tokens. In general, while this is an extremely cool design I would expect it to fail due to lack of user friendliness more than anything. But if somebody or some team put in the enormous effort required to make this usable, I think it would be very promising.
That’s not true, there is no need for such a complex mechanism. The most likely scenario is that people will just agree on a common token to be used for miner incentives, and, if that happens, it will operate exactly like Ethereum in that regard - and that’s fine. So, what is the point of not having a hard-coded token to begin with? Simple, it gives the community the option to migrate to another token or incentive mechanism if, for whatever reason, they desire to. In other words, miner incentives are implemented at contract level, not at protocol level, making the network more flexible. There is no fundamental need to make a network’s security coupled to a specific token, so we don’t do that. And having more options is always good. In my view, that is what good design should be about.
it looks intersting but the the crypto bro part immediately turned me off
Our company has nothing to do with cryptocurrencies! We’re building HVM, a massively parallel functional runtime developed in Rust, based on a new model of computation (Interaction Nets), that is outperforming Haskell’s compiler in some cases by an order of magnitude. I believe it is a groundbreaking technology that has the potential to change the tech industry by making massive parallelism accessible. It is the first “automatic parallelization” project with remarkable real-world success and numbers to back it up.
Yes, we’re building a p2p computer too, but it is just a secondary product we made mostly to showoff the performance of the HVM. Specifically, we replaced Ethereum’s EVM by the HVM, and managed to hit ~100x increased throughput for many opcodes. But that’s just it, a p2p virtual machine. It isn’t cryptocurrency. It doesn’t even have a currency! I share the hate, but not every p2p project is a cryptocurrency. Torrent and DNS existed way before Bitcoin, and are fundamental to the internet as we know it!
That said, this webpage is a draft and we’re due to some massive rework of it, because it is clearly not showing our intents properly, so that’s not your fault. We need to communicate better.
I would be very interested a p2p computer. I think having a shared computer with state is a key building block for a lot of services. I’m also interested in replicating the experience/vibe of having a shared machine that multiple (trusted) people can SSH into. No interest in having money involved here.
Exactly! That’s the spirit/point of our chain: you do NOT need a cryptocurrency to have a worldwide shared computer, and such a thing would be so useful as a technological primitive that projects can rely on, just like internet protocols and whatnot. But I’m almost regretting developing it because people immediately jump to the conclusion that we’re a crypto project, even though the chain isn’t nearly as important as HVM and don’t even have a currency!
Don’t call it a chain IMO. That nearly lost my interest when I saw it.
To be clear, does the chain use proof-of-work or other energy-wasting mechanisms?
If you don’t want people to think it’s a cryptocurrency thing, you badly need to redesign the marketing. The very first thing I see when I look at this is a picture of a chain. You’ve already turned off everyone who dislikes cryptocurrency at this point.
The fact that there’s text on that next page that says it’s not a cryptocurrency thing doesn’t help you much because you already created a bad first impression and some readers have already left by this point.
A second problem I have is this:
This is one of the specific aspects of cryptocurrencies that has made people dislike them.
Could you not cut out the PoW waste entirely by having some TTPs sign blocks, acting like notaries?
Looks like a less banana-pants crazy variation on the Urbit idea.
to be clear the parts that look interesting to me are Kind2 and HVM
Me too. I am also interested in the ‘Interaction Combinators’ mentioned in the manifesto. It is unclear to me how it relates to HVM. Any hint?
HVM is the first real-world efficient implementation of Interaction Nets! We took this new model of computation, which was invented in 1997, developed a memory-efficient representation for it, called Symmetric Interaction Calculus, and, based on that, we implemented the High-order Virtual Machine (HVM), a massively parallel runtime. Right now it only targets functional languages, and it is already outperforming Haskell’s GHC by 9.2x in some cases (!), but it isn’t limited to FP.
Yay, another blockchain.
Our main project isn’t a blockchain, it is a massively parallel runtime. See this answer for a clarification.
I do like the idea that it doesn’t have a token, but a framework for deployed apps to easily offer micro-tokens to miners. It effectively turns it into distributed Patreon.
What I’m missing in the design is that it “obviously” depends on somebody setting up an exchange capable of dealing with an unlimited number of possible tokens, and some way of automatically discovering and registering tokens. In general, while this is an extremely cool design I would expect it to fail due to lack of user friendliness more than anything. But if somebody or some team put in the enormous effort required to make this usable, I think it would be very promising.
That’s not true, there is no need for such a complex mechanism. The most likely scenario is that people will just agree on a common token to be used for miner incentives, and, if that happens, it will operate exactly like Ethereum in that regard - and that’s fine. So, what is the point of not having a hard-coded token to begin with? Simple, it gives the community the option to migrate to another token or incentive mechanism if, for whatever reason, they desire to. In other words, miner incentives are implemented at contract level, not at protocol level, making the network more flexible. There is no fundamental need to make a network’s security coupled to a specific token, so we don’t do that. And having more options is always good. In my view, that is what good design should be about.