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Comment by soupboy | Hacker News Reader

From [1] - "Our users volunteer their idle compute resources because they want to be part of something valuable to the world. We believe that this is a motivator far more powerful than paying people a small amount of money every month.".

Yeah, I don't think that is going to work, especially because you are for-profit organization not SETI

[1] - https://gridspot.com/gridspot_safe

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There's a surprising behavioral economics result that says people will do things for free that they won't do for small amounts of money. A check in the mail for a dollar or two every month isn't as compelling as being part of a group effort.

And empirically, it seems to be working. The number of contributing machines is currently in the six figures. The main risk right now is on the demand side, i.e. whether or not people want this type of compute.

You have 100k computers running this? How come I've never heard of it and don't see a place to sign up to be a host computer?

Seriously? Installer link is on the homepage: https://gridspot.com/

hah, doh. Thought the article linked to the homepage, still think they should have a link from the /compute/ page, people might be interested in both using and being used for this.

Wow, really, six figures? 250 results for "gridspot.com" on google, and yet you have 100000+ computers running this software? I want to hire you! I'll pay you 10 figures/month!

This comment is quite rude, but I still haven't seen an answer for this yet. How did you get all these users to donate their computers even though nobody seems to have heard of you yet? Something seems fishy, and I wish you'd answer.

Fake it till you make it? I don't know for sure, but could they be subsidising the launch by running instances on EC2? ... When they get enough hosts signed up, switch over to their distributed model, or even run a hybrid combination to handle demand spikes.

Google shows results for "gridspot.exe" on ID-this-process sites dating from mid-March. So it's out there and has been for a few months. The question is whose machines it's running on.

Google also has this link as the #1 link ... well for me anyways.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20120329124823AA...

It does in bring into question whether or not gridspot.exe was installed nefariously.

Selling botnets as cloud service? That is not be such a bad idea after all...

Your "giving back" paragraph about what motivates your users is completely dishonest. You know your users are clueless and installed your client because it was bundled with an application they actually wanted to use.

Care to elaborate? What programs bundle this?

Well, people won't do things for free, if someone takes the money for their effort. What is the number of contributors who know exactly what's going on?

I can think of precisely zero ethical ways you could already have more than 100k machines participating. An explanation from you would be very, very nice to see.

An obvious way to do this is how consumers can upload solar power to the grid, and it comes off their bill.

With enough people involved, the compute version of this could be self-sustaining, and the infrastructure guys just take a wee percentage. They are unlikely to be replaced by purely free infrastructure, because money is involved (even if in the form of credits). If there was a shortage at particular time, some people might supply that themselves, for extra cash. Distributed compute supply = local compute supply, with latency advantages.

I don't get this.

People install their program, contribute the power of their computers for free and Gridspot takes money.

Why would anyone do this? Why would anyone contribute their computer resource for other people to make money from that? I would rather, I don't know, mine bitcoins or set up a Tor proxy.

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