There seems to be a fundamental issue with this model. If it's economically viable for a user to use this service, there's no reason why the company wouldn't just do it themselves. The only exception is the cost of the hardware, but over the long term this is a relatively small factor compared to the cost of electricity and bandwidth. Especially considering that the company could use much more efficient hardware than the typical home or gaming computer.
I understand the 'sharing economy' desire to make use of underutilized resources, but this doesn't seem like an economically feasible way of doing so. The model works for Uber/Lyft: cars are a relatively high upfront cost compared to the cost of gas, but computer hardware is often less expensive upfront than the electricity costs of running it for a year. Additionally, much of the economic value in a service like Uber or Lyft is provided by the driver, not just the use of the car. In this service, the user doesn't provide any value, in fact, they're using up cycles/space that could otherwise be monetized.
It's viable because it allows you to sell electricity that other people are paying for, in return for money that you get to keep.
This is harder for the company itself to do, because if they just hire people to go into libraries, universities etc. to install mining bots they might be criminally liable. "Uber for CPU cycles" seems like a less felonious enterprise than installing malware on public-use hardware.
>The only exception is the cost of the hardware, but over the long term this is a relatively small factor compared to the cost of electricity and bandwidth.
My electricity rate is is 15.7 cents per kw-hour. During typical usage (MS Office, web browser, programming), my Intel 6-core desktop (without LCD monitor on) draws about 150 watts.
For back-of-the-napkin estimates, let's round the kwh cost up to 16 cents and the wattage to 300 watts (to cover scenario of some of cpu cores being 100% pegged). The electricity cost of 24x7 for one year would be ~$413.
What remains would be bandwidth costs -- if any. I like many others have Verizon FiOS and even if others have Comcast or ATT, there's no obvious residential bandwidth costs I can think of to calculate. Maybe... if the homeowner wants to upgrade the speed from 75GB@$99/month to 150@$199/month because the he wants to download the datasets faster. That extra $100 wouldn't have been spent for plain web browsing. So conceivably, that would be $1200 per year. What we don't know is how big the datasets are that must be downloaded. I assume the upload size would be minimal because the compute tasks appear to be variations on "y_output = computecombinationsmontecarlobruteforce(x_input)." The y_output answer would usually be order-of-magnitude(s) smaller than x_input.
Assuming there are no extra bandwidth costs, it would be hard for a company to buy computer hardware for less than a homeowner's $413/year electricity cost.
Perhaps suchflex's particular business model is financially wrong. However in general terms, it does seem possible to find a monetizing sweet spot of computing tasks that takes advantage of the idle and wasted resources of existing home computers. However, if the homeowner has to buy extra hardware that was only dedicated to suchflex, that's probably where the economics won't make as much sense.
>During typical usage (MS Office, web browser, programming)...
That's the issue though, this wouldn't be similar to your typical usage. Instead, if they're using your GPU to train neural networks, it'll be running close to or at full capacity.
I realize that you rounded the costs up, but lets just look at the costs of a GPU often used for machine learning - Nvidia GTX 980 TI. According to Nvidia, it draws 250W under load which according to your figures would result in a yearly cost of roughly $344. That's just for the reference card, a typical card that a consumer would purchase would draw even more. You can buy a 980 TI for a little more than $400. That doesn't even begin to look at hardware actually designed for commercial and research applications.
I think that it's possible to find a way of monetizing computer resources, however, I think it has more to do with arbitraging differences in electricity costs. Suchflex's model certainly wouldn't work where I live (electricity costs in NYC are roughly 20 cents per kw-hour) but parts of the US are under 10 cents. I could see a company attempting to profit from these differences by setting up hardware in a cheap state and negotiating a favorable electricity rate. Heavy computation could then be done on these networks for significantly less than it could in New York or California.
In summary, the value of a consumer's unused computer has more to do with their electricity rate than their hardware.
>In summary, the value of a consumer's unused computer has more to do with their electricity rate than their hardware.
I don't see how the calculations support that.
For example if we use your worse case scenarios of an entity (such as Suchflex) that had its own datacenter in a 20 cent kwh region and the crowdsourced homecomputers in a 9 cent kwh region, that's a difference of 11 cents.
If we round up the energy usage to 600 watts (pc + GPU), that 11 cents is an annual difference of ~$578. However, for Suchflex to even run computations at all on their own hardware -- whether its 20 or 9 cents -- they have to spend capex of ~$1500 of motherboard+cpu+gpu. That's the $1500 the homeowner already spent for his own purposes. Therefore, Suchflex can redirect $1500 to pay commissions/awards/etc towards pure computations instead of buying their own depreciating hardware (which includes buying/renting the physical datacenters to hold it all).
It seems like the homeowner's hardware is a very significant part of the arbitrage/monetization equation. Yes, there is also potential arbitrage in regional differences of electricity rates. However, the greater arbitrage (at least the first 3 years) is the unused time on residential pc that would have been wasted. That "unused time" arises from computer hardware that was already purchased for other purposes than Suchflex.
>crowdsourced homecomputers in a 9 cent kwh region
My suggestion was not that an entity use crowdsourced home computers, rather that it would be more efficient for a company to setup their own hardware and rent CPU cycles that way. The big difference is that Suchflex is limited to using hardware that consumers regularly purchase, whereas a company could use significantly more energy efficient setups and negotiate a better electricity rate. This is essentially what AWS already offers. Additionally, if you already have to transmit everything remotely, there's no need to stay in the US. Iceland offers rates around 4.3 cents. I chose the 980 TI for my example because it's about as close to perfect as you can find for this scenario while sticking with consumer grade hardware, average setups would be much worse.
My general point is that I don't think Suchflex's model is viable unless, as pliny mentioned, you have access to free electricity through some less-than-legal means (or you live in Iceland).
> it would be more efficient for a company to setup their own hardware and rent CPU cycles that way. [...] This is essentially what AWS already offers.
I think it's theoretically possible for electricity costs to overwhelm hardware costs but so far, I haven't seen any numbers that make this disparity obvious. Some example AWS costs[1]:
g2.2xlarge is $0.65/hour
g2.8xlarge is $2.68/hour
Notice how 65 cents and $2.68 costs significantly more than the Iceland electricity rates of 4.3 cents/kwh. The hardware capex is "baked" into the AWS rates. The hardware capex for residential home computers is $0.
More analysis would be required to see if particular computation tasks can done 15x faster on AWS optimized instances than the unoptimized residential computers ($0.65/$0.043==15x).
Without concrete spreadsheet of tasks, performance runtimes, and cloud costs, I still don't see obvious evidence that AWS (or Google Cloud) will be more cost efficient than unused home computers.
The whole thing is based on Gridcoin and BOINC anyway, so the good thing that comes out of it is that BOINC research projects like Rosetta@home get more computing power for free.
For this the suchflex guys earn Gridcoins, which they can sell directly on the market and convert to money. But a user could leave out the middleman alltogether and just mine Gridcoins (or alternatively other cryptocurrency but for that you need ASICS) themselves.
Exactly that. People have been running BOINC projects (which make up a great deal of the projects people list on that site such as Asteroids, Seti, Mind Modeling, etc.) and they are all volunteer efforts where people give their computing power away for free. I just don't see where they're coming from offering me $30/month for something people have been doing for free for years...
Or people using company workstations to siphon dollars out of electric bills. This is why bitcoin mining quickly became uneconomical unless you can get energy free or on the super cheap.
Our current Beta Users earning $10+ per week reported not noticing any changes in their power bills. We advise everyone running the SuchFlex Desktop App to keep an eye on their electricity costs and to communicate any significant spikes.
We will be adding: FAQ section, Power Costs calculator, Security section, TOS section to our website soon. Lots of this information is currently communicated to Beta Users through emails, but we are working on consolidating and improving information flow. Thank you for your feedback.
The disk space seems especially weird. Others have mentioned this but even services like Google Drive or Dropbox can give you storage at ~$8/TB so who's on the other end of this transaction, willing to pay premium prices for low end storage?
Might make sense if you want 100 or 1000 GPUs and don't want to run them 24/7. Usually all cloud computing prices tend to be pretty high if you compare them to just renting or purchasing hardware.
You can order backup dedicated server for 155 USD/month with contain 5 x 6TB SAS drives.
It seems that the price is about 6-7usd for TB
So I should get for it 5 x 6 x 6usd = 180USD per month
Other concern is that price for storage isn't linear and multiple small packages are more worth than single big.
So I could use my 1tb to get 2x 500GB and get 10usd instead of 8usd.
joining it with above server I should be able to get 10usd per TB, so 5 x 6 x 10 = 300USD per month - 155 USD for server = 145USD profit monthly?
What I always wonder about those kind of projects is why you never find any specs about the software they use. Not only that it is closed source (what I expect) but they don't give any information about how big it is and what you would need to run it.
You have no control about what is executed on your PC (possibly as root?). In my eyes it completely destroys the integrity and trustworthy of any computer it is installed on.
I also wonder how they calculate the money you get just for having certain hardware. It says a 6 core 3.2Ghz CPU pays out $28/month but what if I have an average of 70% CPU usage the whole time (unrealistic, but still what if)? Do they pay me still $28 even though they only get 30% of what they could get or do they reduce the payment or even worse does the software just take the whole CPU for it self and make the rest of the computer unusable?
I've seen some similar projects (don't remember the names) but none of those actually answered only one of these questions.
I don't think they pay you just based on hardware specs. It's a factor of time that you allow the program to run for, and how much usage of the hardware it gets. Their estimates are probably some middle ground of 50% of the day and 70% usage or something, with the $28+ meaning you could get more for longer/higher usage. It's unlikely that the average working person, with only a couple hours in the evening with their machines turned on (and also actively using them), would earn nearly that amount for the limited time. Especially gamers, where they have significantly better hardware than the average home pc but likely have much higher usage of the hardware. I doubt my pc with a gtx 970 would earn close to the $32 it mentions as I only use it for a couple hours an evening, and in that time the card is working really hard playing modern games in 4k resolution.
This consists of two different parts, the first is just mining cryptocurrencies, but for that you need ASICS in order to be competitive.
The second part is based on Gridcoin, a cryptocurrency that rewards BOINC computations in a decentralized way. So you do all kind of BOINC projects like SETI@home, Rosetta@home (folding proteins),... and the newly generated coins by inflation get distributed according to research done by each user. Again, the important part is that there is no central authority giving out the coins, but each client queries the Boinc projects individually to find out how much research each user has done and the clients then come to a consensus about this, which is stored in the blockchain and is then the basis for the reward each client gets when staking the next time.
Suchflex is basically just a platform built on top of the Gridcoin platform for these "earn money by doing research" projects and simple cryptocurrency mining on the other hand.
If that's the case, their estimated profit is completely bogus. I've been running BOINC pretty much 24/7 on my 2-GPU, 4-core gaming rig for the past 2 months and made about $2.50 so far.
Here's my !stats from the #gridcoin IRC channel:
fediverse> your next staked block will get you: 17 GRC (research owed)
<fediverse> per day, average: 5.7 GRC
<fediverse> (BTC (per day): 0.00005062 / $ (per day): $0.03 / $ (per 30 days): $0.88 / RAC (estimated): 136287.5 / magnitude (estimated): 28.60)
There's NO way that you're going to make $40/month with a 980 crunching BOINC projects, at least not with gridcoin. Gridcoin is $0.50 - $0.75, depending on where you look, and even the best rigs won't make more than 100 a day at best.
Ok, a less cheeky answer is that we really focus on most efficient monetization of computing resources. We come up with our own investment theses based on available digital currencies and blockchain innovations out there and then we track performance and change things on the fly in real-time to increase profitability and manage risk. However, our platform is a hybrid of blockchain technologies and a more traditional distributed computing marketplace, this way we get the best of both worlds.
Looking at the site, I don't think they mine anything yet, it looks super early. But ETH would probably be the best candidate in terms of profitability. Maybe a couple of other alt coins.
It's pretty easy to set up ETH mining yourself and pocket all the money, but that's probably not the audience this software is intended for (Windows users with access to "free" electricity).
It looks like (although not obvious) that you get paid for running this?
If so, I'm pretty certain that it won't be economical due to the power usage. Great for teenagers with gaming machines that their parents are paying the electricity bill on, and that's about it.
And then what does it cost to rent a datacenter, power the thing and the server it's in, and pay for bandwidth?
In any case I do agree their numbers look really high (they need to factor in redundancy and their own margin) and could very well turn out to be either a VC cash grab or an outright scam (malware)
I guess you wouldn't want to perform any mission critical computation on this type of system, unless you can verify the results you obtain using it are accurate, as I can imagine its fairly easy for people to tamper with your data. But I imagine theres a number of types of tasks it would be really good for.
I'm curious how the technique presented in "Reusable Garbled Circuits and Succinct Functional Encryption"
https://eprint.iacr.org/2012/733.pdf could potentially be utilised in such a system. I'm assuming it currently isn't possible due to computation overhead?
Distributed computing is most useful for stuff that you can, well, distribute. A lot of BOINC projects do this by dividing work up into workunits. They send out a packet of data to crunch, the clients crunch it, and return the results.
Many of these workunits are optimization problems without a clear solution and rely on algorithms using randomness, stuff like protein folding and bitcoin mining are examples of this. The nice thing about those is that you can send them out to as many clients as you want and just pick the best answer.
I think the general use case for this is the same as for most crowdsourced computing projects - problems that are hard to solve but whose solutions are easy to verify.
Some of the "Get Started" links don't work at all and the one at the top only asks for an E-Mail. It hasn't even launched publicly yet.
On a side note: I found the website on my phone really annoying to read since lots of paragraphs are animated and it keeps slowly sliding from left to right/right to left every time you scroll over it again.
Could I inquire which browser you're using? All "get started" links should be working. We are publicly launched, however we are onboarding everyone in batches. The next batch will be onboarded by this weekend. Flex on!
Just to confirm, regarding your second point: you found the subtle animation unpleasant? Thank you very much for your feedback.
Or excess solar power. I know of several people who switch to electric heating sometimes because they produce more than they consume and they don't get paid for the excess.
As I mentioned above, our current Beta users earning $10+ / week have communicated that they have not seen any significant changes on their electric bills.
How so? The reasoning here is: If you're earning $50 / month, the 20% commission results in a $10 commission fee. Since Pro Account is $9.99 / month and Zero commissions, a user earning more than $50 / month (and we have a few users approaching $100 / month in Beta) would make the financially reasonable decision to pay the monthly Pro Account fee instead and then forgo any other commissions.
We never mine bitcoin. Our system is a hybrid of blockchain technologies and distributed computing marketplace. Thank you for wishing us best of luck! :D Flex on
Yeah yeah, Eth is pretty much the same thing, but with a turing-complete script. Anyways looking forward to see what happens to you guys going forward.
Hi tux1968, could you please let me know the browser you're using? The "get started" button should take you to an email subscription form. We will onboard current signups by this weekend.
Currently, Windows OS is supported. Mac and Linux support will be released early this Fall. Thanks
I understand the 'sharing economy' desire to make use of underutilized resources, but this doesn't seem like an economically feasible way of doing so. The model works for Uber/Lyft: cars are a relatively high upfront cost compared to the cost of gas, but computer hardware is often less expensive upfront than the electricity costs of running it for a year. Additionally, much of the economic value in a service like Uber or Lyft is provided by the driver, not just the use of the car. In this service, the user doesn't provide any value, in fact, they're using up cycles/space that could otherwise be monetized.