[preseinger]

> Is there any hope of such networks realistically becoming compute platforms?

Bluntly: no.

Open (e.g. decentralized) networks must solve a unique class of problems, like Byzantine fault tolerance, in some cases censorship resistance, etc. The solutions to those problems necessarily impose performance constraints at the system level that are effectively incompatible with any nontrivial use case.

[ganzuul]

You are correct for the use case you specified, but his isn't about utilizing the entire grid at once. A common use case would be getting for example Minecraft chunk generation offloaded, or rendering VR content at a very local compute node.