Got a Mobile Device? Join the Crowd

What if all networked devices can act as a gigantic decentralized computing machine?

BLOG: Camden Dore — 4 January 2018

There are 6.8 billion mobile phone users worldwide, of those 2.32 million are smart phone users. Add to this all PCs, IoT devices, servers, and you have just summed up the most powerful networked computing machine on earth. Perhaps some of you have seen this gem from season 4 of Silicon Valley? If not, it’s worth a watch.

Silicon Valley Season 4: Building a New Internet

All kidding aside, Richard Hendricks’ point is valid; “what if we used all those phones to build a massive network…a completely decentralized internet?” To take the question one step further, “what if all the networked devices can act as a gigantic decentralized computing machine?”

Imagine the world’s most powerful computing machine at your fingertips. Now, imagine you can profit from it.

Enter the Crowd Machine

What if your device could earn you money when you’re not using it? What if you could offset your data plan and the cost of your device by simply downloading an app? What opportunities might you have if you, your family and community are able to spend more on technologies because the gear you buy will literally pay for itself?

The basic concept of this “sharing economy” should not be foreign by now. Airbnb and Uber had largely popularized the concept and refined it to a science. The idea of aggregating idle computing resources to perform useful computations is also not entirely new. Some of us may still have fond memories when SETI at home was running on our screen savers. Distributed computing offers many advantages over centralized computing, such as higher performance at a lower cost, fault tolerant, on-demand scalability, and easy sharing of rare resources. But until the advent of blockchain, it was nearly impossible to implement distributed user account to manage the aggregated computing resource securely and efficiently. Now, together with blockchain, Crowd Machine offers for the first time a completely distributed computing environment that runs on the world’s collective idle computing resources through its decentralized internal economy.

How it works

For those who are not yet familiar with blockchain, you can think of it as a distributed ledger — a giant book of records distributed across the entire network of users. With this ledger technology, records of who contributed what and how much is due are collaboratively maintained by all participants of the network instead of a single trusted authority. This is a critical enabling technology because we have to have a way to keep track of who earned what from whom in order to incentivize people to contribute their computing resource to the network.

Crowd Machine isn’t a blockchain, but it works with them. It uses encryption to always keep the work your device is doing secure. Anyone with a device can participate. It operates in the background and you can set how much of your device’s compute power you lend to the network. All the work you do is logged, encrypted and written to the blockchain. Once it’s written your digital wallet receives payment, settled in Crowd Machine tokens. More importantly, all these transactions are done automatically by the network without the need for a central authority or a middleman.

If I’ve lost you in the weeds, just remember this: that phone in your pocket, that desktop on idle at home, the game console, that wireless printer, that high tech server you bought but never use — could be earning you some serious returns.

See, that’s not so hard. Now for the really cool part

Crowd Machine will only be creating enough tokens to run its network. That is, there’s a set supply. You will always be able to participate, but what you earn can’t be diluted by anyone, ever. You will never have to worry about not getting paid for doing work, be defrauded by a counterparty, or have the value of your work diluted by some central authority who can issue more tokens on a whim to devalue the token you hold.

Did you miss out on Bitcoin’s meteoric rise? Or Ethereum’s? Well, third time’s a charm. Register for our newsletter to get in on our beta release of the Crowd Virtual Machine. Live Q4 2018.

And if you just can’t wait, you can always purchase Crowd Machine tokens in our token sale. If you want to participate, join the future, join the Crowd, signup to our whitelist here.

Camden Dore
Crowd Machine Economist
www.crowdmachine.com