Videocoin: A decentralized, distributed CDN using blockchain technology, led by Halsey Minor

[wankawonk]

I've never invested in an ICO before, but there's a good chance I'm gonna throw some money at these guys.

videocoin.io

The idea is simple: Decentralize content delivery using blockchain to make and settle contracts.

If you've ever set up a CDN for your site, you know how difficult it can be to find the best price and avoid hidden fees. You usually end up integrating several different services--one for encoding, one for origin servers, and another for edge servers. You pay each one of these companies a premium so that they can make money for themselves.

Halsey Minor--the founder of CNET and an original investor in Salesforce, among many other successes--wants to do away with all that by using blockchain technology to build a decentralized CDN. You'll bid for storage, bandwidth, and latency in a decentralized market, with "miners" (analagous to bitcoin miners) around the world providing storage, compute power, and bandwidth.

Content owners are interested. Among the board of advisors for this project are higher-ups at Fox and DirecTV. It's not hard to see why companies like Fox would be interested--they haven't built their own CDN like netflix and amazon have, so they're paying more for their bandwidth than they need to be. Decentralization would help them to avoid paying overhead costs for their CDN provider, without having to build and maintain their own CDN.

I think it's gonna be big for porn, too--tubes big and small could benefit from cheaper bandwidth.

What do you guys think? I think, even if this isn't the company that ends up succeeding, decentralized CDN is coming--it's only a matter of time.

Plus, let's be honest--any altcoin with a smart idea and a good team behind it eventually gets pumped up like crazy. This is one of the coolest ideas and teams I've seen in a while--even if decentralized CDN never works out, this alt-coin is destined for a speculative pumping! Might as well ride the bubble

[onwebcam]

https://sia.tech/

[NemesisEnforcer]

Originally Posted by onwebcam

https://sia.tech/

Awesome

[Tasty1]

https://www.propsproject.com maybe

[Zeiss]

So many coins now...

[Bladewire]

Filecoin

$275 million ICO. It had the largest cryptocurrency ICO funding of all time in September for a reason

[wankawonk]

Originally Posted by onwebcam

https://sia.tech/

Originally Posted by Bladewire

Filecoin

$275 million ICO. It had the largest cryptocurrency ICO funding of all time in September for a reason

I've read the whitepapers for both siacoin and filecoin long before discovering videocoin.

Filecoin isn't even trying to be a CDN; it's just a dropbox replacement.

Sia has CDN on the roadmap but it's not even started to be implemented and is clearly not their main goal. According to their founder (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13723722):

Sia's core user market is people who are willing to pay for cloud storage. This would include businesses and enterprises. Sia's long term game is to offer a cloud storage platform that competes with the likes of Amazon S3 at less than 10% of the price, all while offering the security, privacy, decentralization, and open source codebase of a blockchain project.

Videocoin is being designed from the ground up to be a CDN for streaming video. As interesting as sia and filecoin are, they're not specifically designed to solve video streaming for enterprise-level websites. They're origin servers at best; they don't provide any edge cacheing.

[Miguel T]

Interesting for sure...

[VRR]

This is not a new idea (The Chinese BlockCDN and one other start up that I can't remember right now are now years old), but if they come up with a working product, they might be the first. However, the larger part of the benefits Videocoin claims to have over traditional services is debatable. Here are my personal thoughts based on our run with this idea back in 2016:

Centralization is no longer a synonym of a single point of failure and a single provider does not mean a single server or a single network. Furthermore, multi-CDNs have been around for some time if that's one's cup of tea.
As for pricing - the blockchain itself will not affect the price of the service at all. The fact that free resources in various data centers would be used that would otherwise go to waste (hence the idea that providers would be willing to rent them to the Videocoin network at lower prices and then these would be passed to the customers) is not necessarily true either. Federated CDN platforms (OnApp, for example) do just that. Actually, they do it for the cloud too, including storage and compute power, but it does not mean one gets a better price by default when using them. It also means that the available compute or bandwidth resources may or may not be there when one needs them , as the provider may and will utilize them for their own needs whenever they can.

These are just random thoughts based on the concept of using data centers and enterprise equipment and connectivity. However, the white paper hints that everyone could become a miner. If that is indeed the case, it will not be an enterprise service, but the pricing may really be low thanks to the lower cost of residential internet and consumer hardware. However most residential ISPs have extremely oversubscribed networks with non-guaranteed bandwidth and most prohibit their customers from sharing internet connections or using them to host commercial applications, so this approach may or may not work. The white paper correctly states that modern CPUs continue to be extremely inefficient when it comes to video encoding, so using random people's laptops for such tasks may happen to be not at all feasible. Their concept to overcome this issue is to select only the miners that have enough power and to break the videos in chunks and have them encoded in parallel by numerous miners, but this approach is more challenging than it sounds. Splitting, sending, retrieving and (if needed) stitching back together the fragments are time, bandwidth and CPU consuming operations and represent a steady overhead that is anything but negligible, especially when one has no control over the miner's network connection or available resources. This means that the more fragments the video is being split into, the more time and resources are required, and the lower the benefit from this approach becomes. As such this solution has only a very limited scalability, and limited usability (good mainly for very large files). There is also the issue with improperly encoded source videos, where splitting/stitching is complicated due to missing keyframes.

So I can't tell if what they plan to do will work the way they envision it to be. The quality of the services will be a hard thing to guarantee and many customers do care about SLAs and performance, especially enterprise ones. I would be interested to see the pricing once the product is out.

[Bladewire]

^^^ This

[wankawonk]

Originally Posted by VRR

This is not a new idea (The Chinese BlockCDN and one other start up that I can't remember right now are now years old), but if they come up with a working product, they might be the first. However, the larger part of the benefits Videocoin claims to have over traditional services is debatable. Here are my personal thoughts based on our run with this idea back in 2016:

Centralization is no longer a synonym of a single point of failure and a single provider does not mean a single server or a single network. Furthermore, multi-CDNs have been around for some time if that's one's cup of tea.
As for pricing - the blockchain itself will not affect the price of the service at all. The fact that free resources in various data centers would be used that would otherwise go to waste (hence the idea that providers would be willing to rent them to the Videocoin network at lower prices and then these would be passed to the customers) is not necessarily true either. Federated CDN platforms (OnApp, for example) do just that. Actually, they do it for the cloud too, including storage and compute power, but it does not mean one gets a better price by default when using them. It also means that the available compute or bandwidth resources may or may not be there when one needs them , as the provider may and will utilize them for their own needs whenever they can.

These are just random thoughts based on the concept of using data centers and enterprise equipment and connectivity. However, the white paper hints that everyone could become a miner. If that is indeed the case, it will not be an enterprise service, but the pricing may really be low thanks to the lower cost of residential internet and consumer hardware. However most residential ISPs have extremely oversubscribed networks with non-guaranteed bandwidth and most prohibit their customers from sharing internet connections or using them to host commercial applications, so this approach may or may not work. The white paper correctly states that modern CPUs continue to be extremely inefficient when it comes to video encoding, so using random people's laptops for such tasks may happen to be not at all feasible. Their concept to overcome this issue is to select only the miners that have enough power and to break the videos in chunks and have them encoded in parallel by numerous miners, but this approach is more challenging than it sounds. Splitting, sending, retrieving and (if needed) stitching back together the fragments are time, bandwidth and CPU consuming operations and represent a steady overhead that is anything but negligible, especially when one has no control over the miner's network connection or available resources. This means that the more fragments the video is being split into, the more time and resources are required, and the lower the benefit from this approach becomes. As such this solution has only a very limited scalability, and limited usability (good mainly for very large files). There is also the issue with improperly encoded source videos, where splitting/stitching is complicated due to missing keyframes.

So I can't tell if what they plan to do will work the way they envision it to be. The quality of the services will be a hard thing to guarantee and many customers do care about SLAs and performance, especially enterprise ones. I would be interested to see the pricing once the product is out.

Fantastic post, thank you for your insight. I really don't know whether I think it's gonna work, either. But if it works it could significantly disrupt a multi-billion dollar industry.

As for pricing - the blockchain itself will not affect the price of the service at all.

The blockchain won't; decentralization could. Right now a niche tube pays more (possibly many times more) for bandwidth than pornhub, because that's how CDN pricing works. Decentralize the CDN bandwidth market, and niche sites will have access to the same cheap bandwidth that pornhub and hulu get. That's a big deal, right? (I don't actually know. But it seems like it.)

Is there a way to decentralize the CDN market without needing blockchain?

[jscott]

Originally Posted by onwebcam

https://sia.tech/

Sia could be good buy now considering massive crash among all cryptos, combined with the fact Sia deposits disabled for major exchanges due to wallet/tech issues (should be fixed within few days)

Hitbtc
"Please note that SC deposits are temporarily unavailable due to technical maintenance. Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience."

Bittrex
"Wallet Disabled - Pending developer code updates"

more: https://www.reddit.com/r/siacoin/com...es_megathread/