Comment by joeldw

1 day ago

I'm building a P2P distributed computing mesh that runs in the browser. It's a TS library that provides a few things:

- A WS + WebRTC mesh

- A request/response protocol incentivizing the closest or most efficient peers to respond to requests

- A WASM environment ensuring deterministic execution and supporting contract composition

- Collateralization around responses, ensuring invalid responses have amortized negative value

- A consensus and UTXO layer, focused on low-latency, low-finality micropayments (for request incentive and collateral), using WASM compute as the weight metric

The idea came out of me wondering a few years ago why a multiplayer game couldn't simply be run on the player's machines without a central server. It has grown since, but the focus has remained on low-latency and log(N) state consensus (unlike a blockchain).

It's wrapped up as a single fetch() method, mostly mirroring the browser's native fetch(). There's a lot more I could say; I love working on it and discovering elegant solutions to the problems that pop up. I'm hoping to release a prototype in a few weeks/months. If you're interested in trying it out, let me know (joel at scaffold.io); I'd love to have some other eyes on it.

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joeldw

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Rohansi  17 hours ago

> The idea came out of me wondering a few years ago why a multiplayer game couldn't simply be run on the player's machines without a central server.

That's how they used to work! Some used peer-to-peer networking, others had one of the players host. Some still let you do this but don't always have networking that "just works".

  • joeldw  15 hours ago

    Yes! That's a great model that works well for trusted participants - I'm attempting to build something that doesn't assume trust in any participant; i.e. empowering a node to trust a computation result from an arbitrary peer.

    • Rohansi  15 hours ago

      Sounds like a cool project! Do you have any specific use cases in mind for types of games this would be beneficial for? IMO in most cases having one player be the host is good enough. Maybe competitive games where you want to ensure the host doesn't cheat?

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