

Ask HN: Is client computation a viable alternative to ads? - calanya

Would it be a reasonable business model to have visiting users donate computational power (via the javascript vm in their browser) as long as they're browsing a site?<p>An possibly valuable and easily parallelizable task is brute forcing (mid to low level) encryption keys.
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mooism2
How many page impressions add up to the equivalent of an hour of EC2 time? How
does that compare to ads?

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nolite
How does it make money?

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calanya
Distributed computational resources have a value. For example, there is a list
of scientific projects being conducted via many client computation:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_p...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_projects)

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nolite
No of course, but those are research projects. I assume you're talking about a
business, which implies commercial. Is the govt going to fund your business
like they (directly or indirectly) fund these research projects, or will there
be paying clients/customers? Who will need to crack encryption keys (or
whatever..) often enough to pay you instead of setting up their own cluster?
Ads make money because they make the advertisers money. Is searching for
gravitational waves, or ET going to make someone money?

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calanya
Commercial opportunities include protein structure prediction for drug design,
brute-force attacks for breaking security, and various simulations
(geophysics, finance).

