To understand it better let’s go back to our graphic designer and their movie. When they start the rendering process on Golem, the system will disseminate the job on many smaller tasks. Each video frame will be sent to a different node and calculated there. The completed task will be re-sent back to the sender and compiled into a final version of the movie, while the system shall automatically transfer the appropriate amount of money to the account of computing power , ‘provider’.

Sounds pretty cool and easy, right? – Well, nothing is easy here – admits Julian Zawistowski, CEO of the Golem Project. – Architecture of decentralized system is challenging enough, while our version should be able to execute very complicated operations. All of that is expected to happen smoothly, quickly and independently as the final version of the Golem is hoped to serve the most compute-intensive processes and programs.

However, that’s the future, for now the team struggles with an endless series of complications, each of them complex enough to became an ambitious doctoral thesis proposal. For instance: how to check if a particular node has calculated everything correctly, before the system rewards a provider? Of course, the client finally going to find the mistakes, then what? No claims department, not even a real office to ask for help. So the system designers definitely should implement the calculations to verify the mechanism, although first it has to be invented.

The role model for Golem is a bitcoin network. With its current exuberant technological backbone, bitcoin proved that something which started on a set of very few laptops can grow into a real monster. All of that would never have happened without the new techno-caste which emerged around the first serious cryptocurrency: the miners. Often considered as greedy fuelled bunch of freaks, the miners are in fact the core of the bitcoin network. Yes, they have made serious profits, yes, they earn bitcoins, but what they really do is to provide the computing power that sustains currency’s accounting system: the blockchain system. Encrypted, open, non-editable, distributed and synchronized ledger is the heart of bitcoin network. Every set of operation, encrypted as another ‘block’ is added to the previous chain automatically, by the software working on miners machines. It’s a serious, cryptographically sophisticated operation, and as such it requires some time and energy, some contribution to the growth of the bitcoin community, and only because of this, it is rewarded by a bitcoin sent to the account of a miner whose machine managed to complete the task properly.For sure, those guys are doing what it takes to make their toys pretty powerful. It is enough to say that in 2013, four years after the bitcoin was released, the connected power of miners machines reached and exceed 1 exaFLOPS ( 1018 operations per second). Sequoia – back then the most powerful supercomputer, was no stronger than 16 pentaFLOPS, about 1,6% of what bitcoin network could do.