The big problem I see to be solved with p2p computation is trust. In the example, the problem to be solved is "Do any of these strings hash to a known value?" An adversary can accept the job, sleep for a second, and report "Nope" and collect their payment, without ever doing any work.

In contrast, I trust that if I run code on AWS, it'll actually run the code I give it.

These are solvable problems, but important to think about.

A bigger issue than lying (and randomly failing) clients is the fact that you're farming out your users data to third parties. You might be willing to trust a single entity like Amazon, Microsoft, or Google, who have a reputation to maintain / can be sued (for potentially a lot); but if your farming out to essentially anonymous individuals, there's no repercussions for, say, using their credit card information.

Now, there are definitely use cases where you don't care; which would be a cool application for this; but unless we figure out how to do homomorphic computing, this doesn't seem immediately likely to impact cloud computing prices; even if it was cheaper to simply use excess compute capacity (which I'm not convinced it is).

This is what Golem cryptocurrency does, with the trust protocol in place through the blockchain [1]

1. https://golem.network

Keep dreaming.

Why should we keep dreaming?

AWS at least already has very cheap ways to get compute time if you don’t particularly care about having uniform availability of it in the form of spot instances.

The economics of people letting you use their browser doesn’t make sense. The pay is crap and the time when they are browsing is exactly when they would not want their computer doing a bunch of background processing. You’re better off letting people rent out their CPU time through a dedicated application when they are not using it. And remember electricity is not free.

Even then, it’d be tough to compete with AWS on pricing considering its spot instances do exactly this, even letting you bid for what you want to pay.

I should have explained this in my original post, but I figured it was obvious.

To suggest a solution: don’t offer payments at all but maybe instead gameify CPU time donation somehow. Maybe then you’ll have a better chance, but potentially less participation, unless people are donating to charitable causes. Either way it’s not going to do anything to affect AWS or Google Compute prices. Creating an entire startup just for the goal of getting some reduced prices on the actual compute platforms you want to use is madness. Just pay the money.

Seti@home has been doing this for years

I was thinking of that exact use case — could this be a modern alternative that might get even wider distribution due to lower barriers to entry?

Almost 20(!)

Yup

>AWS at least already has very cheap ways to get compute time

No it does not. AWS and "very cheap" simply don't belong in the same sentence.

Compared to what? Useless to compare anything without numbers.

Compared to what? The compute market in general.

AWS is a premium provider charging premium prices, they've essentially priced themselves as the most expensive provider on the market. It feels insane to describe them as "very cheap".

You might as well be calling a Bugatti Chiron "pretty cheap".

Any datacenter provider will be able to sell you compute time at a fraction of the cost of EC2. Look at OVH for example.

Spot instances are insanely cheap, not talking about EC2.

EC2 spot instances are still EC2.

But cheaper.

>If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

Henry David Thoreau

Seems like getting a Linux kernel and a LAMP stack running on this would be a good first step. The technical challenge of doing it sounds fun and interesting. The real payoff may be when a billing and payment system is able to consolidate billing from processing clients and to distribute the payments to the owners of the processing clients based on the work performed

Why did the parent get downvoted?