Crazy Ideas Thread, Aug. 2015

polymathwannabe

This thread is intended to provide a space for 'crazy' ideas. Ideas that spontaneously come to mind (and feel great), ideas you long wanted to tell but never found the place and time for and also for ideas you think should be obvious and simple - but nobody ever mentions them.

This thread itself is such an idea. Or rather the tangent of such an idea which I post below as a seed for this thread.

Rules for this thread:

Each crazy idea goes into its own top level comment and may be commented there.
Voting should be based primarily on how original the idea is.
Meta discussion of the thread should go to the top level comment intended for that purpose.

If this should become a regular thread I suggest the following :

Use "Crazy Ideas Thread" in the title.
Copy the rules.
Add the tag "crazy_idea".
Create a top-level comment saying 'Discussion of this thread goes here; all other top-level comments should be ideas or similar'
Add a second top-level comment with an initial crazy idea to start participation.

This thread itself is such an idea. Or rather the tangent of such an idea which I post below as a seed for this thread.

Rules for this thread:

Each crazy idea goes into its own top level comment and may be commented there.
Voting should be based primarily on how original the idea is.
Meta discussion of the thread should go to the top level comment intended for that purpose.

If this should become a regular thread I suggest the following :

Use "Crazy Ideas Thread" in the title.
Copy the rules.
Add the tag "crazy_idea".
Create a top-level comment saying 'Discussion of this thread goes here; all other top-level comments should be ideas or similar'
Add a second top-level comment with an initial crazy idea to start participation.

A botnet startup. People sign up for the service, and install an open source program on their computer. The program can:

Use their CPU cycles to perform arbitrary calculations.
Use their network bandwidth to relay arbitrary data.
Let the user add restrictions on when/how much it can do the above.

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.

It's been done, or at least, tried for legal services: http://www.cpusage.com/ http://www.gomezpeerzone.com/ http://zennet.sc/ https://pluraprocessing.wordpress.com/ and there were some older ones which I can't seem to refind at the moment. (Naturally, the illegal ones are fairly successful in being sold for DDoS and spamming and theft purposes.)

My best guess at the failure is that relying on consumer hardware is too high latency, too failure prone, hard to guarantee any sort of security or confidentiality, high overhead in finding and negotiating with and... (read more)

0negamuhia11y

Ethereum does this

3Lumifer11y

LOL But generally speaking it would be interesting to see what the kids of BitTorrent ("you can play only if you share") and Tor ("nah, thank you, we'll set up our own network") might look like.

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Crazy Ideas Thread, Aug. 2015

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Crazy Ideas Thread, Aug. 2015

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