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Sherincall comments on Crazy Ideas Thread, Aug. 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.
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 supporting all the ordinary people running your cloud software, and not particularly cost-effective since consumer hardware may be energy-inefficient and long out of date, especially compared to cloud companies like Amazon EC2 where they build custom hardware to get more efficiencies of scale.
(Note to other commentators: Ethereum isn't what he is proposing because it is incredibly inefficient compared to a regular distributed computing project, for mostly good reasons related to its goals and threat model.)
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.
So, Folding at Home, but with money involved? Any idea if it can justify the increased electrical bills?
Yes, kinda like folding@home, just generalized and easy for everyone to use. Also, big advantage is the bandwidth usage (which would likely be a bigger selling point than CPU time).
As for the electricity cost.. The tokens would have to be worth more than what you spend on extra power. And there's also the thing of "why don't I just use my own PC for 2 days instead of 10 PCs for 5 hours each?", to which the answer is go for it if you can. But you may have a problem where you just got the data and need it folded or whatever as soon as possible.
Again, I feel the bigger use case here is the network, which very low extra electrical bill. For compute, you can just rent EC2 or some other compute station in the cloud, but having hundreds of network nodes for short amounts of time is really hard to buy currently.
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.
This is the Crazy Ideas thread, I left ethics and legality at the door.
I envision grieving gamers to be good customers. "You're beating me at this game where reaction time is really important? I'll spend some money to DDoS you so I can win!"
Unless you're hosting the game you typically don't know your opponents' IPs and if you are hosting the game you don't need to DDoS :-)
Ethereum is somewhat close to this.
Ethereum does this
I think a system that does that does this that provides good VPNs/Proxys would be a winner. When the system runs on an internal currency it can get much faster than Tor.
I would add a way to allow people to connect to your router and then connect to a VPN.