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This reminds me of homomorphic encryption: you can perform computations on data while it remains encrypted, which would solve the trust problems you mention afaict. This seems like it would have enormous potential to change the cloud landscape. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption

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My understanding (which is admittedly very little) though is that homomorphic encryption requires many times more computations compared to running on unencrypted data, so that could dampen it's usefulness.

It indeed seems to be: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.01945.pdf

Perhaps, but there is a LOT of unused capacity out there.

It's less of a resource problem and more of an allocation/networking problem though.

Most problems worth sourcing out requires a lot of data, and piping that through a home network connection to a "meh" CPU and back isn't that useful.

Even if you spend time divvying it up, I can't imagine it would be easier/cost effecitve than just spinning up an AWS node to get it done.

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