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Ask HN: Any experiences with decentralized blockchain app hosting? Ala Ethereum?

1 points by FieryTransition ↗ HN
Or any other Secure multi-party computation or "smart-contract" based hosting?

For example like Ethereums dapps, would love to know how the experience was developing and maintaining the app. Costs compared to traditional hosting etc.

3 comments

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verdverm
You don't put html/js on Ethereum or another blockchain, just the smart contract.

While you can host web assets on IPFS, you will find the UX too slow (latency is high in these systems). Use a CDN like Cloudflare.

The costs are typically greater than regular apps, because you still have to develop the regular app, and also a smart contract + more security auditing. Additionally, finding devs for blockchain is even harder, for several reasons.

Recommendation... skip the hype, start from a problem, choose the best way to solve it, and build something people love.

FieryTransition
Ok, thanks a lot, it was hard to gauge from ethereums own website, just a lot of grand words of what they want to use it for, comparing themselves to web 2.0 as web 3.0, saying they can store both data and code and that they are turing complete.

It's all just confusing, unfocused and non-sensical for actually finding out what its use is, and if it's worth something for a certain use-case. They probably have a really niche target for actual use cases.

IPFS looked interesting, but more so as a technical experimental project.

Thanks for the advice! Definitely agree that people and problems come first, tech later :-)

verdverm
Blockchain co-opted "web3" with web3.js, that's the real story. Decentralization has been around for a long time.

Finance is the niche, you can only trust what was created on chain, as trust breaks down in the transfer from IRL to the ledger.

Anything is almost certainly going to have a worse UX. Finance will accept it because UX is broke as hell in the industry already.

Hyperledger Fabric is an interesting project, proof of authority based. Blockchain affectionados don't like it tho :]