Money for Nothing, Tokens Nearly Free?
New Blockchain Based Technology Delivers Concurrent Revenues For Developers
Have you ever heard that Dire Straits song, Money For Nothing (Video above), which was based on a real life commentary guitarist Mark Knopfler, overheard in a New York appliance store, by a man working there dressed in a baseball cap, work boots, and a checkered shirt delivering boxes who was standing next to him watching MTV? Comments generally taken that musicians really don’t do much, and unlike a hard working guy like himself, “Maybe get a blister on your little finger, maybe get a blister on your thumb”? I just remember the video, from the very early days of computer animation. Yikes, how things have changed.While we may not be at the stage where we can really make “money for nuthin,” we can get pretty close — there is now blockchain tech out there which will allow developers to earn crypto, just by running a small piece of code on their boxes, and letting the boxes do pretty much whatever they’ve normally been doing.
Think of it this way — as a developer you earn mostly by coding — either one time or ongoing: when you code you get paid. With this tech, you get paid when your code runs, not just when you code — your code makes money for you, just like authors do with books or investors do with real estate.
It really is “making money while you sleep”.
Why is this important? Judging by the numbers, you and your customers have probably downloaded and are currently using an ad blocker. The use of ad blockers and private browsers has skyrocketed recently 30% over the last year, virtually eliminating ads for many.
Why is this bad? The premier business model of the internet, the one that Google and Facebook (and many others) make the brunt of their revenues on, is ad supported. As more and more people start using ad blockers and conversational interfaces, a new business model for the internet must emerge.
What do we need to do? We need to come up with new, less intrusive business models, and not those which involve selling off your customers private data (remember the outrage when personal data was used, sold or hacked from Cambridge Analytica, Equifax, Target, Ebay, Home Depot, JP Morgan or others?
What platform will this need to run on? Forget laptops, studies have shown that people are rapidly moving to making their smartphone their primary, always on device. With 2.5B+ powerful smartphones worldwide, they are becoming a real infrastructure for crowdsourcing bandwidth, storage and computing resources. Once bigger and better processing and storage capacity is available on the phones and connectivity via hyperfast 5G, enabling dynamic mesh networks of devices, leveraging all that excess computing power and storage, and allowing both users and developers to earn crypto by renting out that excess to other humans or devices.
Who is doing this today? Here are just a few examples of companies doing this right now.
Computing Power
Warsaw (and Ethereum) based Golem, calls itself the Airbnb for computers: it rents out compute power. When a computer on the network is idle, it puts its CPU to work, paying the owner for the performance delivered. Eventually they plan to develop a decentralized and self-organising network (Wait, isn’t that the plot of Silicon Valley, Season 4?) They focus on engaging the network for the heavy lifting, like CGI rendering (imagine the compute power required for a typical superhero action movie, much better than that music video!), mathematical calculations, DNA analysis, medicine and machine learning.
Hadron lets people mine crypto in their web browsers on phones and computers to enable incredibly powerful AI computations on a global scale. It creates a marketplace that democratizes access to advanced AI capabilities while rewarding everyday users that choose to share their idle devices for useful work. They pool unused resources to sell on an automated free-market exchange. Users and companies can then access services and expertise to leverage artificial intelligence for themselves and their companies.
Storage
Got extra space in that giant multiple terabyte drive sitting mostly empty on a home network? FileCoin has an end-to-end encrypted decentralized storage network and file hosting platform, which lets users rent their space in exchange for tokens. Not only does this drive down prices, its more secure, as files are broken up and stored across multiple locations.
Sia uses its P2P network to store data on hosts with excess storage capacity and pays the hosts for the work that they do on the network. They’ve got something like 5 Petabytes of storage available on over 1000 hosts spread across 50 countries. It makes 50 copies of every file and encrypts and distributes it among its hosts. It lets hosts establish their own prices, which can be less than 10% of what you’d pay Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure per month.
Bandwidth
Believe it or not, there are still plenty of folks out there who are not on the internet (at last count 56% of the world) — just like there are many unbanked, there are many unconnected? Canada’s RightMesh uses a decentralized mobile mesh networking platform, and it aims to connect the world via blockchain, cheaply and free from centralized control. They use phones to form a mesh network that is achieved in a peer to peer fashion using Wifi, Bluetooth, and Wifi Direct.
Open Garden, which aims to help people maximize their internet subscription and stop wastage. Users share their Wifi and internet subscriptions with other users on the network in return for some OG tokens.
Nodle (hey, that’s us!) has created a mesh network to support the explosion in Internet of Things devices using Bluetooth and existing smartphones. Instead of constantly changing 3G, 4G, LoRa or SigFox protocols, we’ve created a software based wireless network leveraging devices already in the wild. By using Bluetooth to crowdsource connectivity, we lower connectivity costs for manufacturers — so everyone wins. We let app developers monetize (“Money for nuthin’”) without selling out their user base or users info. Plus, and this is a big issue for smartphone based mining services, our remote mining solution doesn’t drain batteries — we designed our software from the ground up to have a very low impact on battery consumption. We call this network, The Citizen Network!
Think about it: billions of IoT devices out there, (Statista says that there are 23B already out there, and they project over 75B by 2025) leveraging tiny bits of your bandwidth, invisibly to you, and you getting paid for it. Every time one of these devices checks the temperature, changes your Nest, captures an Arlo image, or detects how much milk is left in your Samsung smart fridge, you get a cut.
It might not be “Money for Nothing”, but it’s pretty close.
