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opportunity here to create cloud computation platforms where people submit work which gets executed on other people's machines who are getting paid to allow the

opportunity here to create cloud computation platforms where people submit work which gets executed on other people's machines who are getting paid to allow their browser to contribute compute ... eventually price of AWS / google compute engine will drop ... win win

matte_black 9y ago
Keep dreaming.
- bob_theslob646 9y ago
  Why should we keep dreaming?
  - zappo2938 9y ago
    >If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them. Henry David Thoreau
  - matte_black 9y ago
    AWS at least already has very cheap ways to get compute time if you don’t particularly care about having uniform availability of it in the form of spot instances. The economics of people letting you use their browser doesn’t make sense. The pay is crap and the time when they are browsing is exactly when they would not want their computer doing a bunch of background processing. You’re better off letting people rent out their CPU time through a dedicated application when they are not using it. And remember electricity is not free. Even then, it’d be tough to compete with AWS on pricing considering its spot instances do exactly this, even letting you bid for what you want to pay. I should have explained this in my original post, but I figured it was obvious. To suggest a solution: don’t offer payments at all but maybe instead gameify CPU time donation somehow. Maybe then you’ll have a better chance, but potentially less participation, unless people are donating to charitable causes. Either way it’s not going to do anything to affect AWS or Google Compute prices. Creating an entire startup just for the goal of getting some reduced prices on the actual compute platforms you want to use is madness. Just pay the money.
    - NegativeLatency 9y ago
      Seti@home has been doing this for years
      - sosborn 9y ago
        Almost 20(!)
      - matte_black 9y ago
        Yup
      - bradknowles 9y ago
        I was thinking of that exact use case — could this be a modern alternative that might get even wider distribution due to lower barriers to entry?
    - ryanlol 9y ago
      >AWS at least already has very cheap ways to get compute time No it does not. AWS and "very cheap" simply don't belong in the same sentence.
      - matte_black 9y ago
        Compared to what? Useless to compare anything without numbers.
        ryanlol 9y ago
        Compared to what? The compute market in general. AWS is a premium provider charging premium prices, they've essentially priced themselves as the most expensive provider on the market. It feels insane to describe them as "very cheap". You might as well be calling a Bugatti Chiron "pretty cheap". Any datacenter provider will be able to sell you compute time at a fraction of the cost of EC2. Look at OVH for example.
        9y ago
king07828 9y ago
Seems like getting a Linux kernel and a LAMP stack running on this would be a good first step. The technical challenge of doing it sounds fun and interesting. The real payoff may be when a billing and payment system is able to consolidate billing from processing clients and to distribute the payments to the owners of the processing clients based on the work performed
- king07828 9y ago
  Why did the parent get downvoted?
fwip 9y ago
The big problem I see to be solved with p2p computation is trust. In the example, the problem to be solved is "Do any of these strings hash to a known value?" An adversary can accept the job, sleep for a second, and report "Nope" and collect their payment, without ever doing any work. In contrast, I trust that if I run code on AWS, it'll actually run the code I give it. These are solvable problems, but important to think about.
- archgoon 9y ago
  A bigger issue than lying (and randomly failing) clients is the fact that you're farming out your users data to third parties. You might be willing to trust a single entity like Amazon, Microsoft, or Google, who have a reputation to maintain / can be sued (for potentially a lot); but if your farming out to essentially anonymous individuals, there's no repercussions for, say, using their credit card information. Now, there are definitely use cases where you don't care; which would be a cool application for this; but unless we figure out how to do homomorphic computing, this doesn't seem immediately likely to impact cloud computing prices; even if it was cheaper to simply use excess compute capacity (which I'm not convinced it is).
- cercatrova 9y ago
  This is what Golem cryptocurrency does, with the trust protocol in place through the blockchain [1] 1. https://golem.network https://golem.network
radioo7555 9y ago
>eventually price of AWS / google compute engine will drop Lol

matte_black 9y ago

Keep dreaming.

bob_theslob646 9y ago
Why should we keep dreaming?
- zappo2938 9y ago
  >If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them. Henry David Thoreau
- matte_black 9y ago
  AWS at least already has very cheap ways to get compute time if you don’t particularly care about having uniform availability of it in the form of spot instances. The economics of people letting you use their browser doesn’t make sense. The pay is crap and the time when they are browsing is exactly when they would not want their computer doing a bunch of background processing. You’re better off letting people rent out their CPU time through a dedicated application when they are not using it. And remember electricity is not free. Even then, it’d be tough to compete with AWS on pricing considering its spot instances do exactly this, even letting you bid for what you want to pay. I should have explained this in my original post, but I figured it was obvious. To suggest a solution: don’t offer payments at all but maybe instead gameify CPU time donation somehow. Maybe then you’ll have a better chance, but potentially less participation, unless people are donating to charitable causes. Either way it’s not going to do anything to affect AWS or Google Compute prices. Creating an entire startup just for the goal of getting some reduced prices on the actual compute platforms you want to use is madness. Just pay the money.
  - NegativeLatency 9y ago
    Seti@home has been doing this for years
    - sosborn 9y ago
      Almost 20(!)
    - matte_black 9y ago
      Yup
    - bradknowles 9y ago
      I was thinking of that exact use case — could this be a modern alternative that might get even wider distribution due to lower barriers to entry?
  - ryanlol 9y ago
    >AWS at least already has very cheap ways to get compute time No it does not. AWS and "very cheap" simply don't belong in the same sentence.
    - matte_black 9y ago
      Compared to what? Useless to compare anything without numbers.
      - ryanlol 9y ago
        Compared to what? The compute market in general. AWS is a premium provider charging premium prices, they've essentially priced themselves as the most expensive provider on the market. It feels insane to describe them as "very cheap". You might as well be calling a Bugatti Chiron "pretty cheap". Any datacenter provider will be able to sell you compute time at a fraction of the cost of EC2. Look at OVH for example.
        9y ago

king07828 9y ago

Seems like getting a Linux kernel and a LAMP stack running on this would be a good first step. The technical challenge of doing it sounds fun and interesting. The real payoff may be when a billing and payment system is able to consolidate billing from processing clients and to distribute the payments to the owners of the processing clients based on the work performed

king07828 9y ago
Why did the parent get downvoted?

fwip 9y ago

The big problem I see to be solved with p2p computation is trust. In the example, the problem to be solved is "Do any of these strings hash to a known value?" An adversary can accept the job, sleep for a second, and report "Nope" and collect their payment, without ever doing any work. In contrast, I trust that if I run code on AWS, it'll actually run the code I give it. These are solvable problems, but important to think about.

archgoon 9y ago
A bigger issue than lying (and randomly failing) clients is the fact that you're farming out your users data to third parties. You might be willing to trust a single entity like Amazon, Microsoft, or Google, who have a reputation to maintain / can be sued (for potentially a lot); but if your farming out to essentially anonymous individuals, there's no repercussions for, say, using their credit card information. Now, there are definitely use cases where you don't care; which would be a cool application for this; but unless we figure out how to do homomorphic computing, this doesn't seem immediately likely to impact cloud computing prices; even if it was cheaper to simply use excess compute capacity (which I'm not convinced it is).
cercatrova 9y ago
This is what Golem cryptocurrency does, with the trust protocol in place through the blockchain [1] 1. https://golem.network https://golem.network

radioo7555 9y ago

>eventually price of AWS / google compute engine will drop Lol