[slowkow]

I'd like to mention related work from 2014 called QMachine. You might also be interested to read the "Security" section of the article.

Wilkinson, S. R. & Almeida, J. S. QMachine: commodity supercomputing in web browsers. BMC Bioinformatics 15, 176 (2014).

http://bmcbioinformatics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/...

"Modern web browsers can now be used as high-performance workstations"

https://github.com/qmachine/qmachine

"QM is an open-sourced, publicly available web service that acts as a messaging system for posting tasks and retrieving results over HTTP. The illustrative application described here distributes the analyses of 20 Streptococcus pneumoniae genomes for shared suffixes. Because all analytical and data retrieval tasks are executed by volunteer machines, few server resources are required. Any modern web browser can submit those tasks and/or volunteer to execute them without installing any extra plugins or programs. A client library provides high-level distribution templates including MapReduce. This stark departure from the current reliance on expensive server hardware running “download and install” software has already gathered substantial community interest, as QM received more than 2.2 million API calls from 87 countries in 12 months."

[andai]

I had the idea a few months ago that, since no one wants to see ads, and since most devices greatly under-utilize potential output, ad networks would slowly be replaced by computation networks over the next few years.

So for the time you spend (actively) on a website, instead of being shown ads, you "rent" your device's CPU etc in exchange for the content.

[fratlas]

I actually tried to do a proof of concept for exactly this but gave up after assuming you could never truly trust the client to not mess with/read the data.

[otoburb]

>>[...] assuming you could never truly trust the client to not mess with/read the data.

We have to wait for fully homomorphic encryption[1] to realize this, or a clever implementation of zero-knowledge proofs. Your proof of concept may work now if you can implement partial homomorphic encryption, perhaps something similar to CryptDB[2] or ZeroDB[3]. I read more about this in a recent Zdnet article that gives a brief summary[4].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption

[2] https://css.csail.mit.edu/cryptdb/

[3] https://zerodb.com/

[4] http://www.zdnet.com/article/encryptions-holy-grail-is-getti...

[fratlas]

This is the conclusion that I came to (without knowing there was a word for homomorphic encryption, thanks!). I really think this is the (ideal) future of monetizing the internet.

[jp555]

Maybe a job for quantum computers, if we can figure out a way to run them like we do current computers and not just in a carefully constructed environment (very cold & quiet boxes).