

Start-up: Development of the Decentralised Currency Model - Horsebrass

"Having followed the history of Bitcoins and the development of cloud and grid computing as a commercial tool through IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), I begin to wonder about whether the model of a digital currency cannot be improved to give it mass market appeal in the following way: given the success of such distributed computing projects as Folding@Home and Eintsein@Home and the voracious appetite of an increasingly large industrial and commercial sector for large amounts of computing power, does Hacker News believe that a model in which commercial users pay an IaaS provider for the use of processing runtime on a distributed network of private physical PCs, the owners of which are reimbursed with a currency "minted" by the completion of commercially-generated work units and underwritten (at least initially) by a proportion of the fees paid to the middleman company, is a workable one?<p>I am not a computing professional, and as such have only a mish-mash of self-taught knowledge of programming and the hardware of distributed systems, but accepting that issues such as security and latency would have to be addressed, are there any glaring faults that people can see in the theory and, more importantly, would you sell your processing time, idle or otherwise, in such a model?"
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wmf
Variations of this idea have been discussed since the commercial spinouts of
distributed.net back in the 1990s. One problem is that there are almost no
commercial workloads that can run on your PC's idle time, mostly due to
bandwidth or security constraints. Also, there are some aspects of behavioral
economics such as the "crowding out" effect which make me think that some
successful non-profit projects like whatever@home cannot be recreated
commercially. In addition, creating a Bitcoin-like currency that is based on
proof of real work is a very difficult unsolved problem.

