If so, I’m curious — how does the amount of compute on these distributed networks compare to the cloud platforms, and what is the overhead resulting from the infrastructure protocol?
I’ve heard numbers to the effect of the global BTC network having a throughput of a couple of dozen transactions per second, for all the song and dance. Is there any hope of such networks realistically becoming compute platforms?
Bluntly: no.
Open (e.g. decentralized) networks must solve a unique class of problems, like Byzantine fault tolerance, in some cases censorship resistance, etc. The solutions to those problems necessarily impose performance constraints at the system level that are effectively incompatible with any nontrivial use case.
Bitcoin is as inefficient as everyone but the cultists claim. The tech I have been looking at resides in another ecosystem with a more academic bent and a much more careful approach to engineering the global economy.
The use case isn't really for utilizing all the compute of the grid for a single task, but instead finding resources for your workload in an efficient manner. E.g. paying your neighbors to generate Minecraft chunks for you without hassle or even speaking with them.
As the computational power on chain is very slow and expensive.