Dwellir - introducing ourselves

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Hey all!

I’m Erik Lönroth, one of the founders of Dwellir

Dwellir is a team of technopriests, social entrepreneurs, artists and scientists dedicated to build a better internet connected to philosophies around decentralization, sovereignty, privacy, transparency, integrity and freedom (we might invent more). We rallied up a few years ago to join the cause. So, when we found Polkadot, it was easy for us to start getting dusty, placing our stones.

Fast forward two years. Dwellir supports today a large number of projects in the Dotsama world, primarily RPC:s, Collators and Bootnodes. We base our operations out of a private cloud infrastructure in the Nordics spanning multiple datacenters, one located in a nuclear bunker in Stockholm.

None of our services run in public clouds. It doesn’t support our vision, so we don’t. We use AWS and Google etc. for lightweight stuff like tests, development and exploring. But, once we’re getting real about deliveries - we always use our own, private, clouds.

Dwellir engages in a number of other projects relevant to our vision and mission. You might have encountered; LXD, Open Source Sweden, Juju to name a few. All of them share, connect or supports our vision direct or indirect. Nextcloud is a personal favorite - check it out.

Going forward, Dwellir is set on improving our private cloud infrastructure to be able to support more advanced setups with more capabilities to support the Polkadot ecosystem. We prepare for some bearish markets during 2023, so we are making sure we are all tightened up and ready once they bounce.

This doesn’t mean we are going to sit on our asses. We are ramping up a strategic collaboration with two other companies to develop, deploy and support clients with lightweight, affordable and easy to operate “Private Clouds”. This is a perfect fit for clients with high requirements on privacy and sovereignty of their data and services. If our viking gods are in a good mood, this work could possibly surface 2023/24. Need less to say, we are going to use it ourselves and possibly offer early access to selected clients. Eventually, everyone should be able to run their own cloud.

We will of course continue to expand on the offerings we already have in the Dotsama, such as but not exhaustive; access to heavyweight and performant build environments, private Nextcloud instances, data and chain insights and RPC/Collator/Staking services and more.

Lastly, there will be parties and if you nominate our Polkadot Validator or Kusama Validator you will be granted access to Valhalla and large quantities of Viking Mead.

Thanx for the introduction!

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Thanks for the intro: I wonder what thoughts you have on the future of hosting for Blockchain apps. If we manage to onboard a million more users, how are we going to serve them without falling into a similar situation as the notorious INFURA?

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I’m not sure exactly what the situation is with them really.

My current general view on hosting for blockchain is that the market is working in the sense that as long as the community is growing and healthy that’s all good.

Perhaps my own focus is more on how the decentralization is panning out. Currently, our data shows that there is a massive accumulation to centralized entities. Here is the facts on that from the chain analytics we have done which you can explore yourself at our website:

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I think that we need to figure out how to combat centralization for the validators which is currently a great concern the way I see it.

Consider this: FED Michael Barr (notorious for his anti-crypto stance) issues a new legislation - placing - ALL staking activity as being a security. AWS, GCE and basically anyone who does business will then see their accounts closed down over night unless they stop their Polkadot/Parachain/crypto activities.

This would render the whole network gimped and Polkadot would according to our stats basically be shut down.

This is not an unlikely scenario at all if you look at what this guy Michael Barr is doing and examples already is in there. Hetzner for example (which is the largest network for Polkadot) - recently declared that any crypto related activity needs to eject from their cloud. Here is the source for this: https://cointelegraph.com/news/hetzner-anti-crypto-policies-a-wake-up-call-for-ethereum-s-future

Quote:

The terms of services, laid down by Ethereum’s second-biggest host Hetzner, prohibits customers from running nodes, mining and farming, plotting, storage of blockchain data and trading.

Also, this situation is similar to how DOT:s are accumulated today to a relatively SMALL set of validator whales which also is a systemic risk which will ultimately tumble down on all of Dotsama unless mitigated.

Dwellir is committed to this decentralization mission, but it needs to be implemented also in technology.

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I totally agree, and this is why I am curious to discuss it further.

I have not looked too much into other ecosystems to know if they are any better and by how much (@will you had some data on this recently, right?), but I have seen the graph you posted above as a criticism of Polkadot (to which I agree). But I have not seen a real solution to the problem either. Blockchains are at the end of the day a public system, and any account that can afford to do something is free to do so. Of course, we can try and propose rules/games that disincentivize certain behaviors, but I have not heard a sound version of this either.

Moreover, this issue, to me, links to the holy oracle problem, which is feeding real work data such as the legal entities behind validators or geographic location to the chain. If we can find a good way to do any of these, then we can build systems that incentivize a more decentralized future.

Lastly, I am curious how would e.g. Dwellir behave in the current technology status quo, as in:

Dwellir is committed to this decentralization mission

For example suddenly Dwellir receives 10MDOTs of nomination, what would it do? Would it not also start new validators? If no, what would it do? What could the protocol e.g. Polkadot do to incentivize that “ideally decentralized behavior”? I find all of these to be hard questions to tackle.

(I am not intending to put Dwellir in the spotlight here, just using it as a hypothetical example, apologies for that, just thinking out loud and trying to come up with ideas).

(If we continue on this this, perhaps we should move it to a new topic).

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This question has two parts. One is a sample event, the other is systemic.

  • In the event Dwellir would be hit by the (sample event) event of getting the trust from 10M DOT nominator, we would be cheering, opening up a bottle of viking mead and get wasted. Happy days.

  • The systemic problem with this, is that we would be one of a few validators that would benefit from centralized staking. The party is over the day that system tumbles down by its inherent problems which should be fairly well known at this point in the crypto community. “Account takedown”, “regulation”, “network outage”, “hacks”, “51% attacks”, etc.

The systemic problem is different from the sample result.

What needs to be done about the structural problem is probably to find a technical solution which implements the nominator reward as a function of decentralization. I’m not a math guy and I understand that this is very challenging, but I think I know enough to be able to contribute.

We should move this discussion to a separate topic. Thanx!

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