There are dozens of projects to share storage; what’s needed are systems that share compute. Crypto currency controversy aside, things like Etherium with smart contracts, or the more venerable - but centrally controlled - seti@home, are more what’s needed. I suppose having the ability to support some mechanism of micro payments isn’t unreasonable, but I think it it were something like “I’ll donate X% of my unused C/GPU cycles to any processing request signed by the public key from this project,” I’d feel more comfortable about it. Micro payments for selling unused cycles to arbitrary projects is just another capitalist market I’m not interested in participating in.
Caveat: I’d be comfortable selling spare compute to for-profit projects: companies, etc. But that’s a side-note. What I’d like to see is a general-purpose way to donate spare cycles to specific projects. Definitely supporting whitelists, but optionally supporting blacklists. I think PK would be the foundation, as it would allow a True Believer to donate cycles to any project in the GNU Foundation, or specific projects from self-hosters.
Such compute would probably be horrendously slow, and figuring out how to parcel out and distribute e.g. compiling a project in an arbitrary language sounds like quite a challenge. I can see cases where the CI speed isn’t especially critical, such as building assets for a release, but the technical challenges seem difficult.
There are dozens of projects to share storage; what’s needed are systems that share compute. Crypto currency controversy aside, things like Etherium with smart contracts, or the more venerable - but centrally controlled - seti@home, are more what’s needed. I suppose having the ability to support some mechanism of micro payments isn’t unreasonable, but I think it it were something like “I’ll donate X% of my unused C/GPU cycles to any processing request signed by the public key from this project,” I’d feel more comfortable about it. Micro payments for selling unused cycles to arbitrary projects is just another capitalist market I’m not interested in participating in.
Caveat: I’d be comfortable selling spare compute to for-profit projects: companies, etc. But that’s a side-note. What I’d like to see is a general-purpose way to donate spare cycles to specific projects. Definitely supporting whitelists, but optionally supporting blacklists. I think PK would be the foundation, as it would allow a True Believer to donate cycles to any project in the GNU Foundation, or specific projects from self-hosters.
Such compute would probably be horrendously slow, and figuring out how to parcel out and distribute e.g. compiling a project in an arbitrary language sounds like quite a challenge. I can see cases where the CI speed isn’t especially critical, such as building assets for a release, but the technical challenges seem difficult.