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Vaniver comments on Crazy Ideas Thread, Aug. 2015 - Less Wrong
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A botnet startup. People sign up for the service, and install an open source program on their computer. The program can:
For every quantum of data transferred / calculated, the user earns a token. These tokens can then be used to buy bandwidth/cycles of other users on the network. You can also buy tokens for real money (including crypto-currency).
Any job that you choose to execute on the other users machines has to be somehow verified safe for those users (maybe the users have to be able to see the source before accepting, maybe the company has to authorize it, etc). The company also offers a package of common tasks you can use, such as DDoS, Tor/VPN relays, seedboxes, cryptocurrency mining and bruteforcing hashes/encryption/etc.
I don't see how this competes with AWS on cost / reliability / etc. on the demand-side. On the supply side, consider cloud server racks as home heating devices.
cost - you pay in your own CPU cycles/bandwidth.
reliability - obviously, the startup would have to earn the reputation for reliability, but there's nothing inherently stopping it.
etc - AWS is a beast, relatively speaking, and this offers a lot of smaller PCs for a short amount of time. I can't really think of a reason where that would be needed for computing, but as network relays it would be very useful. You could create your own custom Tor and deploy it on demand.
It would be like a competitor to AWS. Instead of renting hardware from Amazon, you are renting it from personal computers.
Amazon isn't cheap, especially for higher performance computing, and especially if you want to use gpus - e.g. to train deep neural networks. It currently makes more sense to buy your own hardware. But a lot of people have GPUs just sitting around, and they could make a few bucks and help science, by renting them out. You could possibly even pay back the cost of the GPU at the current market rates.