After reading the article above, I had an idea for something similar to folding@home. Essentially a business that pays regular people $X to register as a compute unit and charges businesses to use that compute infrastructure for massive map-reduce type jobs.
The trick would be charging just enough to financially compete with something like AWS, and paying just enough to compete with bitcoin mining.
Or it could be a stupid idea - I don't know. But I wouldn't be surprised if someone smarter than me was able to find an angle that'd make this profitable (or already has?).
> Essentially a business that pays regular people $X to register as a compute unit and charges businesses to use that compute infrastructure for massive map-reduce type jobs.
It's been done. That you've never heard of the company doing this indicates how successful it's been.
This has been tried several times over the last 15 years (e.g. United Devices); in general the idle time on random PCs is worth less than the overhead of organizing it.
Is this still true though? Lots of businesses are spinning up instances in "the cloud" for big compute jobs and then shutting them down. What bigger cloud is there than the millions of idle internet connected devices?
I've only invested about 5 minutes thinking about it, and previous failures are probably a strong indicator that the idea isn't profitable. I'm just questioning whether previous attempts were premature.
There is a market for un-utilised compute (bitcoin/torrent) and a market that requires compute (AWS/Azure/Etc). An intermediary to join these two markets seems like an opportunity (naively).
Nobody wants this more because it is a security nightmare than anything else. What do you need to distributively compute but is mundane enough you are willing to let random people know the data and algorithms?
Scientific research with volunteer computers seems to be the one case where it makes sense. Perhaps scientific research with paid computers would also make sense? There I think the price point is wrong to incentivize anyone to contribute resources.
I have heard ideas of having people operate server racks to help heat their homes. That way the compute power would be worth it, and the heat would be useful. People could rent the server racks, and be paid for doing the computations, covering the cost of electricity, plus get a cheaper heating bill.
To really be practical it would require useful homomorphic encryption and fast internet speeds, though.
I actually wonder if something along these lines is the real purpose of amazon coins. Amazon is one of very few companys that I have a default assumption that the crazy stuff they do is part of a long term strategy, so the coins stuff is interesting to me. I doubt that the rather superficial analyses we've heard so far are the full story.
The trick would be charging just enough to financially compete with something like AWS, and paying just enough to compete with bitcoin mining.
Or it could be a stupid idea - I don't know. But I wouldn't be surprised if someone smarter than me was able to find an angle that'd make this profitable (or already has?).