
Flex your computing power! - suchflex
http://Suchflex.com
======
nbmh
There seems to be a fundamental issue with this model. If it's economically
viable for a user to use this service, there's no reason why the company
wouldn't just do it themselves. The only exception is the cost of the
hardware, but over the long term this is a relatively small factor compared to
the cost of electricity and bandwidth. Especially considering that the company
could use much more efficient hardware than the typical home or gaming
computer.

I understand the 'sharing economy' desire to make use of underutilized
resources, but this doesn't seem like an economically feasible way of doing
so. The model works for Uber/Lyft: cars are a relatively high upfront cost
compared to the cost of gas, but computer hardware is often less expensive
upfront than the electricity costs of running it for a year. Additionally,
much of the economic value in a service like Uber or Lyft is provided by the
driver, not just the use of the car. In this service, the user doesn't provide
any value, in fact, they're using up cycles/space that could otherwise be
monetized.

~~~
jasode
_> The only exception is the cost of the hardware, but over the long term this
is a relatively small factor compared to the cost of electricity and
bandwidth._

My electricity rate is is 15.7 cents per kw-hour. During typical usage (MS
Office, web browser, programming), my Intel 6-core desktop (without LCD
monitor on) draws about 150 watts.

For back-of-the-napkin estimates, let's round the kwh cost up to 16 cents and
the wattage to 300 watts (to cover scenario of some of cpu cores being 100%
pegged). The electricity cost of 24x7 for one year would be ~$413.

What remains would be bandwidth costs -- if any. I like many others have
Verizon FiOS and even if others have Comcast or ATT, there's no obvious
residential bandwidth costs I can think of to calculate. Maybe... if the
homeowner wants to upgrade the speed from 75GB@$99/month to 150@$199/month
because the he wants to download the datasets faster. That extra $100 wouldn't
have been spent for plain web browsing. So conceivably, that would be $1200
per year. What we don't know is how big the datasets are that must be
downloaded. I assume the upload size would be minimal because the compute
tasks appear to be variations on _" y_output =
computecombinationsmontecarlobruteforce(x_input)."_ The y_output answer would
usually be order-of-magnitude(s) smaller than x_input.

Assuming there are no extra bandwidth costs, it would be hard for a company to
buy computer hardware for less than a homeowner's $413/year electricity cost.

Perhaps suchflex's particular business model is financially wrong. However in
general terms, it does seem possible to find a monetizing sweet spot of
computing tasks that takes advantage of the _idle and wasted_ resources of
_existing_ home computers. However, if the homeowner has to buy extra hardware
that was only dedicated to suchflex, that's probably where the economics won't
make as much sense.

~~~
nbmh
> _During typical usage (MS Office, web browser, programming)..._

That's the issue though, this wouldn't be similar to your typical usage.
Instead, if they're using your GPU to train neural networks, it'll be running
close to or at full capacity.

I realize that you rounded the costs up, but lets just look at the costs of a
GPU often used for machine learning - Nvidia GTX 980 TI. According to Nvidia,
it draws 250W under load which according to your figures would result in a
yearly cost of roughly $344. That's just for the reference card, a typical
card that a consumer would purchase would draw even more. You can buy a 980 TI
for a little more than $400. That doesn't even begin to look at hardware
actually designed for commercial and research applications.

I think that it's possible to find a way of monetizing computer resources,
however, I think it has more to do with arbitraging differences in electricity
costs. Suchflex's model certainly wouldn't work where I live (electricity
costs in NYC are roughly 20 cents per kw-hour) but parts of the US are under
10 cents. I could see a company attempting to profit from these differences by
setting up hardware in a cheap state and negotiating a favorable electricity
rate. Heavy computation could then be done on these networks for significantly
less than it could in New York or California.

In summary, the value of a consumer's unused computer has more to do with
their electricity rate than their hardware.

~~~
jasode
_> In summary, the value of a consumer's unused computer has more to do with
their electricity rate than their hardware._

I don't see how the calculations support that.

For example if we use your worse case scenarios of an entity (such as
Suchflex) that had its own datacenter in a 20 cent kwh region and the
crowdsourced homecomputers in a 9 cent kwh region, that's a difference of 11
cents.

If we round up the energy usage to 600 watts (pc + GPU), that 11 cents is an
annual difference of ~$578. However, for Suchflex to even run computations at
all on their own hardware -- whether its 20 or 9 cents -- they have to spend
capex of ~$1500 of motherboard+cpu+gpu. That's the $1500 the homeowner already
spent for his own purposes. Therefore, Suchflex can redirect $1500 to pay
commissions/awards/etc towards pure computations instead of buying their own
depreciating hardware (which includes buying/renting the physical datacenters
to hold it all).

It seems like the homeowner's hardware is a very significant part of the
arbitrage/monetization equation. Yes, there is _also_ potential arbitrage in
regional differences of electricity rates. However, the greater arbitrage (at
least the first 3 years) is the _unused time_ on residential pc that would
have been wasted. That "unused time" arises from computer hardware that was
already purchased for other purposes than Suchflex.

~~~
nbmh
> _crowdsourced homecomputers in a 9 cent kwh region_

My suggestion was not that an entity use crowdsourced home computers, rather
that it would be more efficient for a company to setup their own hardware and
rent CPU cycles that way. The big difference is that Suchflex is limited to
using hardware that consumers regularly purchase, whereas a company could use
significantly more energy efficient setups and negotiate a better electricity
rate. This is essentially what AWS already offers. Additionally, if you
already have to transmit everything remotely, there's no need to stay in the
US. Iceland offers rates around 4.3 cents. I chose the 980 TI for my example
because it's about as close to perfect as you can find for this scenario while
sticking with consumer grade hardware, average setups would be much worse.

My general point is that I don't think Suchflex's model is viable unless, as
_pliny_ mentioned, you have access to free electricity through some less-than-
legal means (or you live in Iceland).

~~~
jasode
_> it would be more efficient for a company to setup their own hardware and
rent CPU cycles that way. [...] This is essentially what AWS already offers._

I think it's _theoretically_ possible for electricity costs to overwhelm
hardware costs but so far, I haven't seen any numbers that make this disparity
obvious. Some example AWS costs[1]:

    
    
      g2.2xlarge is $0.65/hour
      g2.8xlarge is $2.68/hour
    

Notice how 65 cents and $2.68 costs _significantly more_ than the Iceland
electricity rates of 4.3 cents/kwh. The _hardware capex_ is "baked" into the
AWS rates. The hardware capex for residential home computers is $0.

More analysis would be required to see if particular computation tasks can
done 15x faster on AWS optimized instances than the unoptimized residential
computers ($0.65/$0.043==15x).

Without concrete spreadsheet of tasks, performance runtimes, and cloud costs,
I still don't see obvious evidence that AWS (or Google Cloud) will be more
cost efficient than unused home computers.

[1][https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/](https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/)

~~~
dharma1
those are _guaranteed_ instance prices that you can do anything you want with.
A distributed home computer cloud would be much more like AWS _spot_
instances, which can be turned off whenever and you lose your data (unless
it's backed up to an EBS).

Spot instance prices are typically far less - for g2.2xlarge they average
around $0.1/hr -
[https://ec2price.com/?product=Linux/UNIX&type=g2.2xlarge&reg...](https://ec2price.com/?product=Linux/UNIX&type=g2.2xlarge&region=us-
east-1&window=3)

And note that customers can't run _arbitrary_ or secure workloads with this
proposal - they just want to mine crypto on your hardware and give a small
percentage of returns to you as rent.

When theDAO was launched, I toyed with the idea of an etherium GAPP similar to
Flex but for anything - but it would be a hell of a lot of effort to build,
and I'm not sure there is demand - people won't bother for $10/week,
especially if it takes up a lot of their HD space, bandwidth and makes their
GPU take off (noise).

------
dsr_
The pricing seems odd.

$480/year for a $400 video card? $240/year for 3TB of disk space?

No discussion of bandwidth.

No discussion of security.

No discussion of liability.

~~~
kalleboo
If you cut through all the abstractions, in the end what you're selling them
is electricity, right?

~~~
glastra
And, depending on where you live, most probably at a loss. Here in Spain
electricity is so expensive that this is probably a very bad idea.

~~~
hkjgkjy
So teenage gamers who live with their parents and don't pay for power.

~~~
eumoria
Or people using company workstations to siphon dollars out of electric bills.
This is why bitcoin mining quickly became uneconomical unless you can get
energy free or on the super cheap.

------
Szpadel
You can order backup dedicated server for 155 USD/month with contain 5 x 6TB
SAS drives. It seems that the price is about 6-7usd for TB So I should get for
it 5 x 6 x 6usd = 180USD per month

Other concern is that price for storage isn't linear and multiple small
packages are more worth than single big. So I could use my 1tb to get 2x 500GB
and get 10usd instead of 8usd.

joining it with above server I should be able to get 10usd per TB, so 5 x 6 x
10 = 300USD per month - 155 USD for server = 145USD profit monthly?

PS: site is hosted on heroku

ps2: you can find extra page in google cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:PpTl0nt...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:PpTl0ntxD-
sJ:www.suchflex.com/compute+&cd=2&hl=pl&ct=clnk&gl=pl)

------
jklmnn
What I always wonder about those kind of projects is why you never find any
specs about the software they use. Not only that it is closed source (what I
expect) but they don't give any information about how big it is and what you
would need to run it. You have no control about what is executed on your PC
(possibly as root?). In my eyes it completely destroys the integrity and
trustworthy of any computer it is installed on.

I also wonder how they calculate the money you get just for having certain
hardware. It says a 6 core 3.2Ghz CPU pays out $28/month but what if I have an
average of 70% CPU usage the whole time (unrealistic, but still what if)? Do
they pay me still $28 even though they only get 30% of what they could get or
do they reduce the payment or even worse does the software just take the whole
CPU for it self and make the rest of the computer unusable?

I've seen some similar projects (don't remember the names) but none of those
actually answered only one of these questions.

~~~
SmallDeadGuy
I don't think they pay you just based on hardware specs. It's a factor of time
that you allow the program to run for, and how much usage of the hardware it
gets. Their estimates are probably some middle ground of 50% of the day and
70% usage or something, with the $28+ meaning you could get more for
longer/higher usage. It's unlikely that the average working person, with only
a couple hours in the evening with their machines turned on (and also actively
using them), would earn nearly that amount for the limited time. Especially
gamers, where they have significantly better hardware than the average home pc
but likely have much higher usage of the hardware. I doubt my pc with a gtx
970 would earn close to the $32 it mentions as I only use it for a couple
hours an evening, and in that time the card is working really hard playing
modern games in 4k resolution.

------
nctr
This consists of two different parts, the first is just mining
cryptocurrencies, but for that you need ASICS in order to be competitive.

The second part is based on Gridcoin, a cryptocurrency that rewards BOINC
computations in a decentralized way. So you do all kind of BOINC projects like
SETI@home, Rosetta@home (folding proteins),... and the newly generated coins
by inflation get distributed according to research done by each user. Again,
the important part is that there is no central authority giving out the coins,
but each client queries the Boinc projects individually to find out how much
research each user has done and the clients then come to a consensus about
this, which is stored in the blockchain and is then the basis for the reward
each client gets when staking the next time.

Suchflex is basically just a platform built on top of the Gridcoin platform
for these "earn money by doing research" projects and simple cryptocurrency
mining on the other hand.

~~~
dharma1
Some cryptocurrencies (like ETH) can't be mined with ASICs, due to large (2gb
and rising) RAM requirements

~~~
nctr
Yes, but suchflex is only about those that you can either mine with ASICS
(PoW) or CPUs and GPUs (in this case Proof of Research with Gridcoin).

Pure PoS cryptocurrencies cannot be mined by suchflex.

~~~
dharma1
ETH is currently PoW

~~~
nctr
ah yes, true that.

Then I was wrong, does suchflex also mine ETH then?

~~~
dharma1
Looking at the site, I don't think they mine anything yet, it looks super
early. But ETH would probably be the best candidate in terms of profitability.
Maybe a couple of other alt coins.

It's pretty easy to set up ETH mining yourself and pocket all the money, but
that's probably not the audience this software is intended for (Windows users
with access to "free" electricity).

~~~
suchflex
We're early, but we're not that early. We have over 4k users and 300-600 daily
users.

------
danpalmer
It looks like (although not obvious) that you get paid for running this?

If so, I'm pretty certain that it won't be economical due to the power usage.
Great for teenagers with gaming machines that their parents are paying the
electricity bill on, and that's about it.

~~~
suchflex
Our current Private Beta users earning $10+ per week communicated that they
have not noticed any significant changes in their electric bills.

~~~
Ameo
I find that INCREDIBLY hard to believe. I guess I'll have to wait to see.

------
drinchev
For 96$ Yearly you give 1TB and for 99$ yearly you can buy Dropbox with that
amount of storage.

I don't get how they set such a big price for that.

~~~
kalleboo
I imagine Dropbox are overselling and banking on most users not using 1 TB.
Amazon S3 charges $30/mo for 1 TB of storage.

~~~
phaed
Still doesn't make sense you can find $60 1TB drives.

~~~
kalleboo
And then what does it cost to rent a datacenter, power the thing and the
server it's in, and pay for bandwidth?

In any case I do agree their numbers look really high (they need to factor in
redundancy and their own margin) and could very well turn out to be either a
VC cash grab or an outright scam (malware)

------
deutronium
I guess you wouldn't want to perform any mission critical computation on this
type of system, unless you can verify the results you obtain using it are
accurate, as I can imagine its fairly easy for people to tamper with your
data. But I imagine theres a number of types of tasks it would be really good
for.

I'm curious how the technique presented in "Reusable Garbled Circuits and
Succinct Functional Encryption"
[https://eprint.iacr.org/2012/733.pdf](https://eprint.iacr.org/2012/733.pdf)
could potentially be utilised in such a system. I'm assuming it currently
isn't possible due to computation overhead?

~~~
throwaway7767
I think the general use case for this is the same as for most crowdsourced
computing projects - problems that are hard to solve but whose solutions are
easy to verify.

~~~
deutronium
Yeah, that'd definitely make sense. I still really like the idea.

------
ne0phyte
Some of the "Get Started" links don't work at all and the one at the top only
asks for an E-Mail. It hasn't even launched publicly yet.

On a side note: I found the website on my phone really annoying to read since
lots of paragraphs are animated and it keeps slowly sliding from left to
right/right to left every time you scroll over it again.

EDIT: Talking about this
[http://i.imgur.com/JVtcTKg.gif](http://i.imgur.com/JVtcTKg.gif)

~~~
suchflex
Could I inquire which browser you're using? All "get started" links should be
working. We are publicly launched, however we are onboarding everyone in
batches. The next batch will be onboarded by this weekend. Flex on!

Just to confirm, regarding your second point: you found the subtle animation
unpleasant? Thank you very much for your feedback.

~~~
ne0phyte
Yeah I found the animation distracting since it is so slow and keeps sliding
in every time you scroll over it.

I'm used to sites having transitions or animations as you scroll, but usually
that's only happening once.

~~~
suchflex
ok, we decided to change it to more traditional configuration: animates only
first time you scroll over it. cheers

------
dharma1
As others have noted, once you deduct the cost of electricity, there isn't
enough money in this for people to bother to "rent" their hardware

~~~
pliny
Lots of people have access to other people's electricity, often in conjunction
with access to other people's hardware.

~~~
dharma1
Great. A distributed theft network

------
suchflex
Wow, posted this before going to bed and woke up to lots of comments and
interest. Thank you very much for your excitement and support!

------
homero
They're mining cryptos

~~~
suchflex
Our system is a hybrid of blockchain technologies and a distributed computing
marketplace.

------
Ameo
Has anyone else noticed the paid membership tiers?

"Maximize your earnings with a SuchFlex Pro Account"

Couldn't sound like a sketchier pay money to get money scheme if they wanted
it to.

~~~
suchflex
How so? The reasoning here is: If you're earning $50 / month, the 20%
commission results in a $10 commission fee. Since Pro Account is $9.99 / month
and Zero commissions, a user earning more than $50 / month (and we have a few
users approaching $100 / month in Beta) would make the financially reasonable
decision to pay the monthly Pro Account fee instead and then forgo any other
commissions.

------
qrpike
Signed up for this and minutes later got notifications from LogMeIn with
failed login attempts from Russia. Never had this happen EVER before.

~~~
suchflex
That's quite unusual. At the moment your email simply goes to a Mailchimp
email list. We will onboard current signups by this weekend.

------
hkjgkjy
20% commission for the service of not running your bitcoin miner in a terminal
window, wow. I wish these guys luck!

~~~
suchflex
We never mine bitcoin. Our system is a hybrid of blockchain technologies and
distributed computing marketplace. Thank you for wishing us best of luck! :D
Flex on

~~~
hkjgkjy
Yeah yeah, Eth is pretty much the same thing, but with a turing-complete
script. Anyways looking forward to see what happens to you guys going forward.

------
tux1968
Get Started button did nothing.

Was curious to see what operating systems are supported.

~~~
suchflex
Hi tux1968, could you please let me know the browser you're using? The "get
started" button should take you to an email subscription form. We will onboard
current signups by this weekend.

Currently, Windows OS is supported. Mac and Linux support will be released
early this Fall. Thanks

