Gaining back control of the internet
How Ocelot is decentralizing cloud computing
I recently came across an ambitious company that will completely redefine the way we are using the internet. Or rather, the way we are using its underlying infrastructure which ultimately is the internet. While looking at their offering, I also learned how to get anonymous cloud machines, you will also learn how to get anonymous cloud machines and how to avoid the hassle with MetaMask for users.
Sounds interesting? It is! This presentation by Lon Lundgren at San Francisco Blockchain Week explains the core idea of Ocelot and a cool new project they built on top of it. The project is called Burner Machine and allows you to get an anonymous cloud machine for three hours for just one USD.
After watching it, I reached out to them and ended up collaborating with the team. Working with them, I learned more about their vision, ideas and tech behind the project. It turned out to be even more fascinating than I imagined.
The reality of internet today
You can see that, whether you like it or not, more than half of the cloud market today is owned by just three companies: Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
This situation is not likely to change. And with the cloud market itself growing more and more, the internet itself will essentially be in the control of three companies.
Crypto to the rescue
But wait, don’t we have this amazing decentralized technology called “Blockchain”? An internet where there is no central control. A space of peace, privacy and fairness. Yes, we do, but what good is that if 33% of all websites are hosted on AWS anyways?
And even worse, the architecture of this great new decentralization is still just reliant on AWS, e.g., Infura which is using AWS currently. Or think into the future of ETH2.0 and the new VDF ASIC's. Now imagine Amazon having a bunch of ASIC's around and offering those as another VDF service on AWS.
So no rescue?
The reality is that these cloud providers are here to stay, but we can still use blockchain technology for the rescue!
Ocelot proposes to create an autonomous infrastructure substrate with Blockchain at its core as a way to provide people with cloud resources without the need for an account and without being locked in with a single centralized provider. As an example, they built Burner Machine, which allows you to get an anonymous cloud machine for three hours.
This all happens
- Fully client-side, without any server storing any of your data
- Fully end-to-end encrypted
- Transparently on the blockchain, with no need for MetaMask
Fully client-side
More power to you, the user. The Burner Machine application has no backend. In fact, the only time you communicate with a web server is to download the static frontend. Once you’ve opened burnermachine.com, you can request a new machine by interacting with the Burner Machine smart contract. This contract is monitored by the Ocelot substrate which launches and configures your anonymous cloud desktop. The substrate is itself hosted on the cloud and constantly self-replicates to new cloud machines, effectively making it decentralized and impossible to shutdown.
Fully end-to-end encrypted
When you open the application, your browser generates an ephemeral key pair used for encrypted communication. All interactions with the Burner Machine smart contract are encrypted with Ocelot's public key. The response, which is sent through the blockchain and contains your virtual desktop connection information, is encrypted with your ephemeral key, so that only you are able to access the Burner Machine.
And no MetaMask?
Another cool trick is that MetaMask is not even required when you pay in ETH. This is the first time I have seen this kind of payment flow. It is really cool and deserves some special attention. An address is presented on your screen and you can send ETH there by whatever means you want.
But how is the data passed to the smart contract if you only send ETH?
Once again, the browser is there to help us. The address you sent ETH to is simply a wallet generated by the Burner Machine application in the browser. Once it detects ETH on the address, it automatically sends out a new transaction with all of the required data. No further user interaction is required. We might be seeing more services using this trick in the future. Simple, elegant and secure.
The future
I know that Burner Machine is just the beginning for Ocelot. The underlying technology has a lot of potential. Ocelot has already integrated several big cloud providers and will continue expanding their offerings. Yes, the servers will still be owned by Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
This is a reality we cannot change, but we can use blockchain to give more control and power to the user. And ultimately, we will even be able to truly decentralize blockchain infrastructure by running a decentralized Infura service using Ethereum nodes hosted on Ocelot.
Solidity Developer
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Upcoming Devcon 2021 and other events
The Ethereum Foundation just announced the next Devcon in 2021 in Colombia
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Kickstart your Dapp frontend development with create-eth-app
An overview on how to use the app and its features
Last time we looked at the big picture of Solidity and already mentioned the create-eth-app. Now you will find out how to use it, what features are integrated and additional ideas on how to expand on it. Started by Paul Razvan Berg, the founder of sablier, this app will kickstart your frontend...
The big picture of Solidity and Blockchain development in 2020
Overview of the most important technologies, services and tools that you need to know
Now, I do not know about you, but I remember when I first started with Solidity development being very confused by all the tools and services and how they work in connection with one another. If you are like me, this overview will help you understand the big picture of Solidity development. As I...
Design Pattern Solidity: Free up unused storage
Why you should clean up after yourself
You may or may not be used to a garbage collectors in your previous programming language. There is no such thing in Solidity and even if there was a similar concept, you would still be better off managing state data yourself. Only you as a programmer can know exactly which data will not be used...
How to setup Solidity Developer Environment on Windows
What you need to know about developing on Windows
Using Windows for development, especially for Solidity development, can be a pain sometimes, but it does not have to be. Once you have configured your environment properly, it can actually be extremely efficient and Windows is a very, very stable OS, so your overall experience can be amazing. The...
Avoiding out of gas for Truffle tests
How you do not have to worry about gas in tests anymore
You have probably seen this error message a lot of times: Error: VM Exception while processing transaction: out of gas Disclaimer : Unfortunately, this does not always actually mean what it is saying when using Truffle , especially for older versions. It can occur for various reasons and might be...
Design Pattern Solidity: Stages
How you can design stages in your contract
Closely related to the concept of finite-state machines, this pattern will help you restrict functions in your contract. You will find a lot of situations where it might be useful. Any time a contract should allow function calls only in certain stages. Let's look at an example: contract Pool {...
Web3 1.2.5: Revert reason strings
How to use the new feature
A new Web3 version was just released and it comes with a new feature that should make your life easier. With the latest version 1.2.5, you can now see the the revert reason if you use the new handleRevert option. You can activate it easily by using web3.eth.handleRevert = true . Now when you use...
Devcon 5 - Review
Impressions from the conference
I had a lot to catch up on after Devcon. Also things didn't go quite as planned, so please excuse my delayed review! This year's Devcon was certainly stormy with a big typhoon warning already on day 1. Luckily (for us, not the people in Tokyo), it went right past Osaka. Nevertheless, a lot of...
Devcon 5 - Information, Events, Links, Telegram
What you need to know
Devcon 5 is coming up soon and there are already lots of events available, information about Osaka and more. Here is a short overview: Events Events Calendar Events Google Docs Events Kickback Most events are in all three, but if you really want to see all, you will have to look at all three...
Design Pattern Solidity: Off-chain beats on-chain
Why you should do as much as possible off-chain
As you might have realized, Ethereum transactions are anything but cheap. In particular, if you are computing complex things or storing a lot of data. That means sometimes we cannot put all logic inside Solidity. Instead, we can utilize off-chain computations to help us. A very simple example...
Design Pattern Solidity: Initialize Contract after Deployment
How to use the Initializable pattern
There are a few reasons why you might want to initialize a contract after deployment and not directly by passing constructor arguments. But first let's look at an example: contract MyCrowdsale { uint256 rate; function initialize(uint256 _rate) public { rate = _rate; } } What's the advantage over...
Consensys Blockchain Jobs Report
What the current blockchain job market looks like
Consensys published their blockchain jobs report which you can checkout in their Blockchain Developer Job Kit. The most interesting aspects are Blockchain developer jobs have been growing at a rate of 33x of the previous year according to LinkedIns jobs report Typical salary is about...
Provable — Randomness Oracle
How the Oraclize random number generator works
One particularly interesting approach by Provable is the usage of a hardware security device, namely the Ledger Nano S. It uses a trusted execution environment to generate random numbers and provides a Provable Connector Contract as interface. How to use the Provable Randomness Oracle? Use the...
Solidity Design Patterns: Multiply before Dividing
Why the correct order matters!
There has been a lot of progress since the beginning of Ethereum about best practices in Solidity. Unfortunately, I have the feeling that most of the knowledge is within the circle of experienced people and there aren’t that many online resources about it. That is why I would like to start this...
Devcon 5 Applications closing in one week
Devcon 5 Applications closing
Watch out for the Devcon 5 applications. You only have one week left to apply either as Buidler Student Scholarship Press Devcon is by far the biggest and most impressive Ethereum conference in the world. And it's full of developers! I am especially excited about the cool location this year in...
Randomness and the Blockchain
How to achieve secure randomness for Solidity smart contracts?
Update 2023 : Ethereum transitioned to Proof of Stake! If you are interested in the randomness there, you can now use the updated info over at https://soliditydeveloper.com/prevrandao. When we talk about randomness and blockchain, these are really two problems: How to generate randomness in smart...