[geocrasher]

In 2007 when distributed computing was still a New Kid On The Block, I shared an idea with a colleague for what I considered to be a good idea at the time:

Distributed computing for hire.

Families around the world have reasonable amounts of computing power that sits mostly unused; why not make a few bucks doing things similar to Folding@Home Seti@Home, but for a price? Get paid for your computations.

Of course this was before Bitcoin was a thing, and looking back, it feels naïve to have thought it could be successful. I certainly lacked the expertise to build such a thing. But I wasn't the only one thinking of it. Others tried it and appear to have failed. From 2011:

Ask HN: Is there a paid Distributed Computing service? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2499466

These days I'd be concerned to run somebody else's workload on my own equipment, lest the FBI/CIA/KGB/FSB/Interpol/SecretService/GRU show up at my door.

Still, an interesting thought especially given how powerful so many devices have become.

[jtsiskin]

One company that this reminds me of is Luminati (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hola_(VPN))

It’s not just your spare compute, but your residential IP address is valuable as an unblockable address for bots and scrapers

[fsociety]

They are now Bright Data, I’ve anecdotally heard sketchy shit can happen on their proxies. Scary stuff.

[ALittleLight]

I'd be worried about offering storage to random people, but what kind of compute are you worried about doing? I guess someone could use this as a kind of proxy, right? Like have your system perform some attack or send some communication.

[geocrasher]

Computing generally implies even temporary storage, doesn't it? If not then you are correct. Even so, I would be wary of allowing my own equipment to be used for purposes that I did not explicitly approve of. Who's to say my equipment could not be used in legal but distasteful (to me) ways, by companies I'd never otherwise do business with? I don't think that it would be reasonable to trust any distributed computing for hire company to honor my wishes when it came to those things. If history has taught us anything, especially when it comes to computers, it is that the almighty dollar rules over all else.

[TedDoesntTalk]

> I'd be worried about offering storage to random people

Isn’t that precisely how IPFS works?

[X6S1x6Okd1st]

IPFS mostly functions with people choosing specific files to keep available.

[sp332]

Maybe brute-forcing passwords?

[rkeene2]

This was a real thing before 2007 and is the reason the "seccomp" syscall came into being with CPUShare/CPU coins (2005).

https://web.archive.org/web/20060118044349/http://www.cpusha...

[geocar]

> Distributed computing for hire.

So I've been doing this for a couple decades now: You create an ad tag that does some work, and you buy some impressions. You then get to "hire" thousands or millions of compute-nodes around the world to do some work. Tooling to split up the work into ad tags is just something I've accumulated in the while.

The real trick I think would be allowing users to join the (ad) network as an audience-of-one that we can pay directly, and my thinking is it was always less of a technical problem than a tax/legal problem. If you (or anyone) think this part of the problem is easy you should get in touch.

[dTal]

...what do you use this for?

[geocar]

The same thing anyone else does with a billion CPUs: Hashing things and looking for collisions, or variants on the theme.

Nowhere else could you get CPUs as cheaply as you could buying the cheap banner video vast+vpaid and simply not calling adImpression.

[darrenf]

Sounds to me like you're describing GridCoin[0], which operates on top of BOINC[1] which itself was spawned from Seti@Home.

[0] https://gridcoin.us/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Open_Infrastructure_f...

Edited to add footnote: no affiliation or familiarity with GridCoin! Just that the concept described rang a bell, and I was able to find the link.

[rapnie]

> In 2007 when distributed computing was still a New Kid On The Block [..] Distributed computing for hire.

I remember I was excited about that based on CORBA, ages ago. There was a paper where this was outlined (which I can't find).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Object_Request_Broker_A...

[pytlicek]

Can't agree more on this :)