Okay here’s an idea for an app. I’m using the metaphor of day trading because that’s the closest I can think of. We’re thinking that at some point we could buy and sell processor power and we know we can adjust vault settings to allocate bandwidth and such. Now a lot of the time one will be asleep or AFK so what of we could create an app to automatically take advantage of that inactive time and up resource alloment that was “for sale” to the network during that time and then crank it down again so that it was available to the user when they got back again. This would be even more important for those that share a network connection and need to be careful as to when they crank up their network usage.
If you know you’ll be afk from x time to y time it makes sense to sell more during that time. And if you sell more than you use then you stand to make profit. You could even buy increased resources when you’re active and sell resources when inactive so that you could stand to have a higher quality connection and experience when you are there, you might even still be able to make profit this way if you manage to sell more than you buy.
Could an app like this be created?
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Apps like that already exist.
You don’t really need an app to do this, you could do it manually: download input files, put them in a directory, churn, upload to a public place and send the link to the guy wiling to pay for results.
Of course ideally you could set it and forget it. A 50-line script could automate that.
There are some projects that already do that (e.g. Folding Coin - foldingcoin.net, but also there’s a whole new altcoin, was it Gridcoin or something).
From the econ perspective, I’m not sure if hobby users can provide such resources iin a meaningful way. The economics of the latest CPU almost always beats all existing CPUs, so even if you charged nothing for your CPU (that is, you only charged for power), I suspect you wouldn’t be competitive. Maybe a P2P system - if you had some workloads yourself - would make sense.)
Among various attempts I’ve seen, I like Folding Coin because it’s simple and it does what it says. And they don’t tell you you’ll get rich or change the world (much).
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I think so, but it’s early to know what options will make sense for things like this. I think there will likely be various kinds of “resource” sharing, trading etc that develop over time. MaidSafe have some plans in this area, but as I say, a bit early to start thrashing them out in any detail. Definitely worth discussing though, and figuring out what possibilities there might be 
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