Forgive me if this idea has been discussed before!
The rough idea is to create a P2P overlay network to help establish an `Application/VM hosting marketplace`.
- Anyone with spare storage/bandwidth/cpu cycles can become a host and earn bitcoin by entering into a time limited hosting contract with a customer.
- Host publishes his price “I run virtual machines @5BTC per day on my kickass infrastructure” and his capabilities “Xeon 2.4 GHz 8gig ram with gigabit connection”
- A customer wants his virtual machine to execute on a powerful server in some data centre, so he will upload his encrypted application package(or virtual machine) onto the P2P data store.
- He then will browse the marketplace to find a host with decent reputation and price, and enter into a contract with him, paying in BTC (perhaps via some escrow) and giving decryption keys
[Benefits to customer]
- Responsiveness. Contracts can be established in seconds and automated
- If we are being DDOS’d (or sudden growth in demand) – quickly set up contracts with other hosts (and probably decide not to renew existing failing ones)
- Diversity of infrastructure – no single point of failure
- Censorship resistant. If one host is censored, simply start a contract with new host
- Encourage new ways of financing infrastructure costs
- The marketplace could allow for crowd-funding popular, but not-for-profit applications.
- E.g. The running of Tor exit nodes could be incentivised in this way
- Competition amongst hosting providers can help reduce costs and increase quality.
- Reputation system for hosts can include quantitative performance metrics such as uptime, average response time, etc
[Benefits to hosts]
- Barrier to entry is pretty much zero, anyone with bandwidth & cpu cycles to spare can become a host
- Just run an open source P2P client on your machine and start accepting contracts to earn BTC
- Reputation system for customers can help foster better business relationships
- All the benefits of taking payments in BTC vs traditional means
- They can quickly and easily terminate their relationship with client by stopping their application
- In case of breach of terms/illegal activity etc
