The Internet has fostered the development of machines that can collect sensor-generated data and sell it in return for passive bitcoin payments, 21 Inc stated on Medium . There are presently two paradigms by which this process works: grid computing and cloud computing. The grid refers to a group of heterogeneous machines in offices and homes that different economic actors manage. The cloud refers to the homogenous servers in data centers that single entities like Google or Amazon manage.
Since the launch of Amazon Web Services , the cloud has been the better-known of the two paradigms (cloud and grid) and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. What Hinders The Grid?
The grid concept has existed for decades, but it has not been adopted widely. The two best large-scale grid computing applications are SETI@Home and Folding@Home. These are academic projects that essentially “pay” status to a distributed network of volunteer computers by displaying a leaderboard of the top compute time contributors.
Grid computing is hampered by the absence of a workable micropayments system, according to one hypothesis. It was hard to have automated, speedy, global payments before digital currency came into existence.
But if it were possible to use micropayments to rent out bits of a machine’s time, and not only those in a Google or Amazon data center, new applications become possible. The Value Proposition
Computers must have a distinctive value proposition to have something on the grid that is worth selling. The grid computers will not typically have better price/performance ratios for storage, memory or compute compared to their cloud counterparts. However, grid computers have the advantage of existing in the real world and being owned by real people as opposed to being isolated in data centers.
Someone with a working micropayments system could rent out grid computers to […]
