[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).