I tried building a startup around this back in ~2012 called "Netkine". The basic premise was that compute is fungible and that all compute has a price (regardle

I tried building a startup around this back in ~2012 called "Netkine". The basic premise was that compute is fungible and that all compute has a price (regardless of whether it is from a datacenter, or from someone's desktop PC). We seeded different compute on different networks around the SF Bay Area (either in low cost datacenters, or different networks like Comcast/AT&T) and had a customized version of Linux which could securely boot on a Windows gaming machine. You could then carve out different sized virtual machines on any machine in the network, and it would seamlessly create a VPN tying each of the instances together. Our biggest problem was finding customers on the demand side. What is the killer application which can take use of that kind of compute with those kinds of networking properties? What are the use cases? No one has written software that takes advantage of that kind of compute, because it's essentially a solution looking for a problem.