[jasode]

>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.

[nbmh]

>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).

[jasode]

> 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.

[1]https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/

[dharma1]

those are guaranteed instance prices that you can do anything you want with. A distributed home computer cloud would be much more like AWS spot instances, which can be turned off whenever and you lose your data (unless it's backed up to an EBS).

Spot instance prices are typically far less - for g2.2xlarge they average around $0.1/hr - https://ec2price.com/?product=Linux/UNIX&type=g2.2xlarge&reg...

And note that customers can't run arbitrary or secure workloads with this proposal - they just want to mine crypto on your hardware and give a small percentage of returns to you as rent.

When theDAO was launched, I toyed with the idea of an etherium GAPP similar to Flex but for anything - but it would be a hell of a lot of effort to build, and I'm not sure there is demand - people won't bother for $10/week, especially if it takes up a lot of their HD space, bandwidth and makes their GPU take off (noise).