I think that what you are looking for is simplemining.net
Yep. That's pretty awesome actually. Guess it's linux-based. Hard to tell. Hard to blame him for soft-peddling that, I guess.
Wonder how much graphics simplemining is pushing through the pipes. Wonder if it needs X to be running on the host machine. Just thinking with the MBA side of my brain, I don't think that's the optimal way to do it. I don't think that's the direction it's going. I see the AMD world tossing X to the curb. No idea what nvidia is up to, but I think OpenCl is the eye of the storm, and from what I've read, that is and has been moving in the direction of bypassing X altogether. Not quite there yet, I don't think. But I think that's where it's going.
I'm assuming there's always been client-side software in the mix. Question I have is, can ALL the graphical stuff be client-side. I mean, it's not 1984 anymore, right?
Got a nickel says your average miner would do anything to ditch the graphical environment. Suspect most do, if they can. Suspect those who do bring a lot of expertise to the table, or else pay for it.
So yeah, could be an opportunity there. Host-side product that is delivered (and maintained) with drivers, software, scripts, networking and security baked into the pie. Client side software ported to... well that's the thing. Kinda feel OP is looking at it upside down. Big task trying to figure out how to build from scratch. Build the app first, and I think everything else will start to look quite clear. Put it this way. When he starts looking to see what's lurking beneath the surface of android, chrome OS, chrome browser, steam -- I think he's going to be pleasantly surprised.
Now, the question is, where does he add value.
I'll start with the proposition that miners aren't precisely "making money," and speculators aren't precisely "investing." We are engaged in the process of providing liquidity for people who are willing to pay for it. That's what gold miners do, and that's what we are doing too, only better. No gold miner ever offered to guard your gold against theft, keep your books for you, and open up a "Paypal Gold" account for you. OP is right about that, and right about how important decentralization is to the whole scheme.
And he's right about the need to get power to the people, because up until now, liquidity was a government problem. Your average guy seldom runs into a liquidity issue. I mean, if you really have to sell your car right now today to afford tuition, yes you have a liquidity problem. If you don't have enough assets to pay your tuition, that's different.
Things are different now. Every man, woman and child in India has a liquidity problem right now today. Every Chinese dude who wants to invest in American or European securities has a liquidity problem. Every guy in Venezuela or Zimbabwe who is tired of working for "money" because he can't convince the guy at walmart to trade toilet paper for it has a liquidity problem.
This is the interesting and subtle part about OP's proposal. It's that jillions of ordinary folks around the world are gonna be willing to pay for liquidity (and anonymity, and hedge value), and that it would be kinda good for ordinary folks to facilitate that. I mean, we don't want to double the hashrate overnight. But we don't want the network to be dominated by a few government-approved whales, either.
Where he's not quite on it is the ease-of-use thing. Screw that. That misses the point entirely. It's not that, I dunno, Africans are too stupid to figure out network security. It's that everybody's time is worth something, and if people are going to run a node -- which is what it's really all about -- it needs to be worth their time. The only entity that can consistently afford to waste money is the government, and that's how the whales get in.
It's about making it work. It's about making running a node businesslike and efficient. And I think the key to the whole thing is getting rid of unnecessary complexity. Which means, getting rid of unnecessary overhead and uncertainty.
Look. I like my Mac as much as the next guy, but once I got the idea in my head to build 10 or 20 mining rigs, it occurred to me that the GUI is a Faustian bargain. I'd rather eat worms than manage a 20-node Windows network, and Ubuntu isn't much better. Either way, I'm always one upgrade away from down time. In both cases, I think the graphical environment is the problem. Of course it is. I look at my work computer. It's not just that they make us use Windows, not just that, as a result, they have insane hardware and IT costs. It's that they make us use Citrix. Which means, we are running Windows inside Windows. Even when it works, we are trying to cram all those graphics through these little tiny pipes, which wouldn't seem so tiny except to the extent that we make them so. I can't believe they can afford to pay me what they do to sit there and watch the spinning hourglass of death every time I click the mouse, not to mention having to boot Windows multiple times every day, because it never works for long. Not to mention having to boot it TWICE multiple times every day. Who thought that was a good idea? Have we lost our minds? And running xorg-xserver-GDM-metacity-unity on 20 machines that never interact with a human is even worse. I mean, windows can't help what it is. Linux should know better.
Meanwhile I've been trying for the last month to prototype a rig, and every time I turn around I'm changing my protocol because some new version of radeon-turbo-nitro-OC-pro won't talk to this week's version of X-almighty-whatever, not to mention the fact that my motherboard is constantly accusing me of feeding it the Stuxnet virus. And just to be clear, the kernel is sitting over there saying "I didn't do it," and I believe it. It's the graphical environment every doggone time. If I could figure out how to compile the software without it, I would. Fortunately, it doesn't need anything with an X in it to run, so I kick that sucker, and the trash it hangs out with, to the curb as fast as I can. My feeling is that the people writing the code feel much the same way.
Now, I'll startxfce4 (or nowadays I guess I have to ask systemctl to handle it, don't even get me started) if it's the most efficient way to do what I want to do, and sometimes it is. It is not the most efficient way to keep my machines running and talking to each other. It's the opposite of that.
That's the point. Ease of use ain't the thing. I'm not stupid, I'm busy. So if you're talking about my money? Deliver me a host product that works, and keeps working. And a client that lays out what I need to know without having to ask for it, basically. You're doggone right I'd pay for that. You don't need to make it easy, not exactly. I mean, we don't engineer the cockpit display in an F22 precisely to make it easy. We lay it out in such a way that the human brain has direct access to critical information without going through a translation paradigm. We are removing clutter, removing intermediate steps, taking some of the workload off the brain. Removing unnecessary complexity and overhead. I know that's what you really meant, or at least on one level I think that's what you meant. Stay focused on that.
Key to the whole thing, OP, is to solve the right problem. The GUI is the problem, not the solution. We baked the icing into the cake, which was a mistake. If you can dig us out of that mess, you win.
