As a civilization we really under utilize distributed models for several solutions.

Respectfully, nah. I don’t want to troubleshoot compute nodes in varying states of abuse. I’d rather deal with 10,000 of them crammed into a dc for consistency purposes.

Things like BitTorrent are quite resilient and cope well with unreliable nodes.

Shouldn’t be that hard to design something that is primarily distributed and falls back on straight download.

Things like hugging face serving petabytes of files that are huge and don’t really change.

Compute is probably a bit harder to reliably stick onto residential

I am personally of two minds about it, because while I might be partial to the example mentioned, I can immediately tell how it would in real life. It would be just like with the Simpsons[1].

"Oh, please. For a nickel a person tax increase... we could build a theater for shadow puppets. Balinese or Thai? Why not both? Then everybody's happy."

In other words, no one will be happy. Let individuals keep making individual decisions.

There's Peer5, which got acquired by Microsoft and got rebranded "ECDN":

https://peer5.com/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13501581 Launch HN: Peer5 (YC W17) – Serverless CDN

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/peer5 P2P delivery network that enables high quality video streaming

Also PeerCDN apparently, which got acquired by Yahoo?

https://web.archive.org/web/20150810065820/https://peercdn.c...

If you run a Web search for some combination of "P2P", "Peer", and "WebRTC", combined with "CDN", you can also find a smattering of other (vaguely spammish) company blogs and (small, personal) GitHub libraries that seem to talk about something similar:

https://www.w3.org/wiki/Networks/P2P_CDN

https://github.com/AgustinSRG/webrtc-cdn

https://mediafoundation.medium.com/the-rise-of-peer-assisted...

https://github.com/vardius/peer-cdn

https://www.cachefly.com/news/deciphering-p2p-the-basics-and...

https://castr.com/blog/ecdn-or-p2p-cdn/

https://github.com/Peer-to-Peer-CDN/P2P-CDN

https://blog.blazingcdn.com/en-us/next-generation-content-de...

So there appears to actually have been quite a bit of "concerted effort" in this direction, both open-source and with company funding. Either it's kept fizzling out for some reason, or became standard and is now taken for granted.

IMO the most prominent project in this direction is PeerTube, in that it's using idle upstream bandwidth as a big part of its pitch (It's in the name!):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebTorrent

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeerTube

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38443855#38444796 (V6 dropped WebTorrent but still does "P2P via WebRTC".)

But there are some privacy and security issues with this idea too. What happens if your website uses up all of a customer's data plan by uploading to peers when they leave it open in the background? And do you really want every webpage you visit to be NAT-hole-punching, announcing your presence, and uploading who-knows-what data to random strangers?

A surveillance op could construct a list of everybody who visits a given page by simply refreshing the page every few seconds and logging the peers it connects to. And a vulnerability anywhere in the WebRTC stack, from router to browser, could let you get `pwn`ed by a random peer even if the website you visit is clean.

In China they have something called PeerCDN which does this and pays people money to use their upload. ISPs disconnect subscribers who are caught using it. To avoid suspicion from up/down ratio as some ISPs use, many PeerCDN subscribers also download lots of dummy data from random internet servers, increasing network load substantially.