Sanctuary Video Transcoding Mining - 2023

I'm making the case for a change to Biblepay in 2023 that I believe has the potential to make us more valuable and efficient.
 
It's widely believed that real world use cases are the key to success in this industry and I believe if BiblePay provides a solid real-world use case, it can rise to become a top crypto.

(Aside from the fact that we do have real world use cases for Christians covered, such as funding orphan charity by sponsoring orphans, accepting tithes from crypto users and being a Christan branded wallet) but further from that:

RandomX is good in many ways, its fair and full of integrity because it provides honest rewards for any type of hashing power.  But where I see the problems with POW mining:  the mining concentration ends up going to these small pockets of consolidated miners in areas where electricity is cheap and ends up being a small handful of people that have the machines and power to mine (not the everyday random user we expected).  The original vision was for the small time end user to simply hash the KJV bible and every small random miner gets a reward and thats clearly not happening.  Partially because we have discovered you cant trade anonymity for security, and with the POW protocol, the bigger players consolidate into a monopoly because they can afford to.

Enter video-transcoding mining from sanctuaries.  Video transcoding is a very popular use of computing power.  Look at Transcoding Libx264 HLS transcoding APIs on the internet and see there is a lot of competition and it costs a fair amount of money per video (usually half a cent per minute etc).  The idea is to accept jobs for free as a network (emphasizing Christian videos if possible that get uploaded as mp4s to our network) and our sancs process these instead of the mining function (by accessing a backlog queue) and they store these in our dec. storage network for viewing.  When our partner sites use these videos and pay for storage fees we keep these otherwise they get purged.  (We can discuss storage fees in a different proposal, this proposal is for mining).

The miner in the sanctuary would be modified to run at a non-competitive hashrate (so that some sanctuaries do not act in an arms race fashion to take all the rewards), the rewards would be round robin and fair based on the existing deterministic pay schedule.  The mining reward would be reduced by 95% so as to remove this competetiveness but the Sanctuary standard reward would be Raised by the same amount to compensate all Sancs equally for this workload.

The wallet itself would be modified to only accept Sancs as valid miners (blocks would only be solved by sancs).  The randomx pool would be retired.
New miners would need to lock funds to run a sanc to be a miner.

For the small investor who does not meet the capital requirements, we will still offer Turnkey Sancs on unchained for that use case so that even the small investors can participate for  network rewards.

At the same time, to maximize ROI per sanc, we will retire UTXO staking as well, thus simplifying the IT requirements behind the scenes.  Those rewards will also be added to the sancs rewards to make it very lucrative to do video mining.

Thus in the end, our block emission would be:  10% orphan charity, 5% governance, 85% sanctuary-video-mining.

Longer term picture looks like this:

- Companies use BBP to transcode videos and to Store videos
- We as a network bill for transcoding and storage fees for videos stored on our network (real world use case)
- Videos that are not paid for are purged from storage
- We set up a channel for God related videos to be encouraged to be uploaded.  They are reviewed by users and if legal, the foundation continues to pay storage fees for those videos so they can be watched on our social media system.

What are the current requirements for a Sanctuary? The amount of BBP and minimum server specs?

What are the current requirements for a Sanctuary? The amount of BBP and minimum server specs?

4.5MM bbp, and a dedicated 6core ubuntu 20.04 VMS with at least 400Gb hard drive free.

4.5MM bbp, and a dedicated 6core ubuntu 20.04 VMS with at least 400Gb hard drive free.

True where is the best deal for a server like that? Do you think it would be better if we raised the amount needed to lock significantly? I personally don't want to have to worry about 20 different servers or pay for that. I like being able to add to my portfolio builder and I can forget about it while it earns.

True where is the best deal for a server like that? Do you think it would be better if we raised the amount needed to lock significantly? I personally don't want to have to worry about 20 different servers or pay for that. I like being able to add to my portfolio builder and I can forget about it while it earns.

The server is about $12 a month at contabo for the Cloud VMS midtier.

I don't think we can change the 4.5MM at this point (there are about 50 dependencies on that in different areas) and its very disruptive and Ive already changed it before .  But more importantly the 4.5MM is really sized for future growth (not for making it easy for us).  Imagine when the price is 10* higher, it will be $4500 per sanc and just another stones throw away in the future, $10K per sanc then people will want it *lower* at that point; so we have to consider that future.

However we will always try to have fractional sancs available for people who dont want to run all the software.  One benefit to removing PB is the ROI will go up on the fractional sancs so its sort of a consolidation into making something standardized.

Note that you can run 5-10 instances of BiblePay Sanc on one of these VMSs currently (we only have a rule that the BMS must be hosted on this type of hardware, and that the port # is between 10000-10010 something to that effect).  Of course we reserve the right to lower that if this service takes off (from a usage standpoint) in the future but for right now its investor friendly.

Ok all valid points and I agree. Thank you for that server recommendation because the ones I was finding had ridiculous prices.

Ok all valid points and I agree. Thank you for that server recommendation because the ones I was finding had ridiculous prices.

Looks like it went up $1 a month since the last time I rented one:
https://contabo.com/en/vps/vps-m-ssd/?image=ubuntu.267&qty=1&contract=1&storage-type=vps-m-400-gb-ssd

Hi Rob - Good to hear about the upcoming changes. I like the idea of transcoding (CPU/GPU usage) and serving videos (storage and bandwidth?). h.264 is a well supported format. Are there plans to support newer codecs like hevc, or av1? av1 is open source and royalty free. God bless your efforts.

Hi Rob - Good to hear about the upcoming changes. I like the idea of transcoding (CPU/GPU usage) and serving videos (storage and bandwidth?). h.264 is a well supported format. Are there plans to support newer codecs like hevc, or av1? av1 is open source and royalty free. God bless your efforts.

Hi Sun! Good to hear from you.  Hows your health and recovery from your miraculous deliverance?

So on this video mining, its on track to being released into test very soon and its working in unit test no problem.
The CPU usage is a little high when new videos come in, but I think since we have over 35 sancs that will probably not be a problem unless we ever grow to the size of rumble or something.  We've had 300 videos sitting in there for a couple years, so at this point, technically the spike in CPU usage is miniscule compared to the work ingress.
Bandwidth is even less of a concern on an upload because its done once and its over.  The bandwidth challenge will defiitely be serving customers (when they come) via our homegrown CDN.  But I think we can solve that too by blending some of the load off to a competing CDN like Fastly or cloudflare etc.

But anyway, Im supporting the HLS Libx264 at first to get off the ground.  This is because this is the industry standard for Youtube and Rumble.
The issue isnt really a simple technical choice of a codec, to explain a little more of this from an end to end perspective:
The ability to skip around when watching a video on youtube, the fast start, and the non-buffering on mobile, those are all achieved with codecs that do file splitting, like HLS (that have a manifest with the video), and then the HLS Libx264 part comes in when you talk about industry standard video players ability to play those.

So if youve seen any of our sanc videos on unchained.biblepay.org | Social | Videos you can see what I mean - the quality should be on par with the way youtube works...

But of course if we ever grow to have video demand for our 'sanctuary video widget' on third party sites, more codes can be added if they would be aligned and necessary to work with the corresponding player.  (We have a Sanctuary video player also that has to work with the format).

I'm using an open source version of ffmpeg in the sanctuary miner for dotnetcore.

Rob,
You mentioned that this video service will be user friendly and be able to help BBP become more popular.  How is the user supposed to upload videos and pay for the service in an easy to understand manner?  Maybe theres a wiki on this and I just missed it.  Is there a GUI or website that a person can go to and easily upload the videos and then be able to link to that video on thier own website?  Are there plans to also host data other than videos?

Thanks!  I have been mining for a couple years now and am excited about the work you guys do on this crypto.  I'm just wondering if this service would be user friendly to get more attention from people who aren't invested in this project.

Rob,
You mentioned that this video service will be user friendly and be able to help BBP become more popular.  How is the user supposed to upload videos and pay for the service in an easy to understand manner?  Maybe theres a wiki on this and I just missed it.  Is there a GUI or website that a person can go to and easily upload the videos and then be able to link to that video on thier own website?  Are there plans to also host data other than videos?

Thanks!  I have been mining for a couple years now and am excited about the work you guys do on this crypto.  I'm just wondering if this service would be user friendly to get more attention from people who aren't invested in this project.

Ive been a little concerned about that myself, I mean, comparing the ability to share gospel videos (and prophecy videos), and provide a CDN (IE a real world valuable service) as compared to mining really when you weigh them out, Imho, the video service wins over heat mining, right.  So thats step 1.
Regarding the web site, we have "unchained.biblepay.org" and it does have a video viewer where you can view the sanctuary videos right now.  Although I admit, the ERC20 login process and register process needs to be improved.  Its a little hard to understand as a new user how to create an account (you can but its not easy to understand).  I feel that I can handle improving that.
Im really over the long term looking for more help in making BBPs timeline and social media presence better (IE more programmers).
But yes, we totally need wikis, and Im absolutely sure we can document the upload video process and the view video process, and figure out some type of staking that goes on to make BBP more valuable (maybe staking BBP on an important video for example).
In the past our devs have already written an upload UI, but its just not exposed yet so that will be available too (for the avg user to upload something).