[deutronium]

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?

[Ameo]

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.

[throwaway7767]

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.

[deutronium]

Yeah, that'd definitely make sense. I still really like the idea.

[sjayasinghe]

If the cost is not an issue you could run the same computation on multiple clients and verify that they all produce the same result.

[deutronium]

Yeah, that seems to be how SETI does it