
Show HN: A Marketing Bot That Sells OpenStack Cloud Instances for Bitcoin - kordless
https://www.stackmonkey.com/blog/for-bitcoin-from-a-twitter-marketing-bot/
======
Alex1540
This is really a very deep examination about the nature of trust, online
identity and its precepts cleverly disguised as a proof-of-concept. Or maybe
it's just a way to get servers and pay with bitcoin. Either way, it's a potent
precursor to a distributed compute exchange.

~~~
kordless
It keeps my office warm too!

------
kordless
Happy to answer any questions about the project in here. It's all Open Source
and parked on Github:
[https://github.com/stackmonkey](https://github.com/stackmonkey). Thanks for
taking a look!

~~~
pquerna
Pretty cool demo!

The pre-pay model works well for reservations of a VM, but what are your
thoughts about consumables that vary, eg Bandwidth? Would you imagine service
providers just say, hey X VM includes Y gig of transfer per hour?

~~~
kordless
Thanks! Providers could create payment endpoints to increase or decrease
transfers, storage or compute resources. If you need more of X, you simply
squirt BTC at the address.

The appliance currently allows you to set an ask price for the instance size,
but later versions could easily let you configure how much you charge for what
resource, even doing so based on current demand on your systems.

------
droopyEyelids
Now have the bot automate payroll, and have it post bounties for provisioning
new hardware & links to ISPs

~~~
kordless
The bounties for the ISPs should come by way of revenue share on StackMonkey.
Anyone can be a provider with the appliance, and groups of companies can band
together to form appliance groups to share excess compute. I love the idea of
bounties for software development as well - especially given OpenStack
development can be somewhat opinionated at times.

------
zhemao
Well this will be used for totally legitimate purposes I'm sure.

~~~
pquerna
I work for Rackspace, we have a cloud. Sometimes people do illegitimate things
with it -- but attackers using resources fall generally into two groups:

1) Fraudulent Payment method (eg, stollen credit card)

2) Someone hasn't patched Wordpress (or another app) in 3 years, box gets
hacked, then used for bad things.

So, at least with paying via BTC for compute, you pretty much eliminate #1 --
in all cases the provider gets paid, no chargebacks, etc.

~~~
danohuiginn
you don't eliminate #1, it just has less consequences for the hosting
provider.

Bitcoins can still be stolen (albeit perhaps not as easily as credit cards).
But since there's no chargeback system, the victims don't have much recourse.

~~~
kordless
The expectations that we'll eliminate 100% of fraud are fundamentally flawed.
Fraud will always exist. The Bitcoin blockchain provides a good amount of
fraud resistant technologies that can be used by external systems to help
lower the incidences of fraud in their own systems. Unfortunately, some
systems that have connected to the blockchain have been vulnerable to being
broken into, which is where the coins usually get stolen. It's companies like
Coinbase and Blockchain that carry that responsibility for the rest of us, and
for that, I'm grateful.

I would hazard the amount of fraud will go down considerably (compared to
credit card fraud) once we've sorted around the best practices for securing
your coin.

~~~
al2o3cr
If we always applied best practices for CC data, there wouldn't be much fraud
with that system either. Sadly, we live in the real world.

------
dochex
I love the idea, but to me bitmessage is a better fit for the control
interface. Doesn't help with the marketing part tho.

~~~
kordless
I've considered adding this before, so I just threw a ticket up for it:
[https://github.com/StackMonkey/utter-
pool/issues/31](https://github.com/StackMonkey/utter-pool/issues/31)

------
judk
Why is Twitter a better comms method than email or a regular website?

~~~
kordless
It's a MVP of the larger concept of a highly distributed cloud. This feature
runs in a much larger project. It took me a few days to write it, and got your
attention! :)

------
patio11
The cryptocurrency enthusiasts call this a Distributed Autonomous Corporation
and they envision a future where they're capable of being entirely self-
sustaining by using APIs to a) create value for customers (human or, more
interestingly, not), b) transact with customers, and c) purchase the resources
they need to continue living.

(A rather smart gentleman who may not appreciate me attributing the
conversation explained his theory that Bitcoin is, itself, one of these. He
and I agree more on that than we disagree, though he meant it as a compliment
and I'd phrase it as a "self-organizing Internet boiler room with very
impressively engineered viral spread among people susceptible to certain
flavors of memes.")

~~~
kordless
I had a rather engrossing conversation about a runaway version of one of these
eating all our compute. One of the individuals in the conversation came up
with a way to incentivize efficiency in the network, so we all calmed down a
bit afterwards. I still wonder about it though.

~~~
patio11
Good news: Bitcoin can't go Clippy because you can't get > X compute for X
compute's cost in BTC, at virtually any margin, to say nothing of the scales
required to e.g. meaningfully impact availability at any major cloud provider.
Ask if you care about the economic or engineering details, but typically,
people running Bitcoin mining on public clouds are doing so to exfiltrate
value from accounts or payment methods which they have stolen, in a way which
is fairly difficult for law enforcement to combat. (That or they're
enthusiasts who either don't particularly care about monetary incentives or
should have spent a wee bit more time reading about currently successful
mining strategies.)

------
notastartup
what is openstack and how does it differ from digitalocean?

~~~
kordless
OpenStack is a set of software components that run on one or more Linux boxes.
Together, they form a cloud _thing_ that looks very similar to DO, but runs in
your own datacenter (or in my case under the house).

If you are interested in installing it and have an Ubuntu box laying around, I
have some scripts that do it pretty quickly:
[http://www.stackgeek.com/guides/gettingstarted.html](http://www.stackgeek.com/guides/gettingstarted.html)

