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'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).