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aljaz
I've been having this idea gestating in my brain for a while, its part of something bigger that I'm trying to conceptualize but the gist of it is:
DVMs can make passive income from residential internet connections.
More and more websites are trying hard to penalize non-residential traffic with tons of catchas or straight up blocking the requests. Which means that you cannot just roll your own vps somewhere and use it as vpn as easily as it used to be.
Or try downloading a youtube video from it. But you would pay couple sats for it. Which means that any pleb that has a raspi or something else running somewhere at home could run a simple DVM that would download the video for the user and send it to them.
This is only the start, there are a lot more things we could do in a distributed way to basically provide a solution to a problem that many have, specially now in the days of AI where scrapping as much data as possible is something people are paying for.
Forget about trying to run LN nodes to earn an income. Just install a package on your umbrel, start9 or whatever platform you are using and start offering services.
And its not just about serving the people on nostr. We can build websites and abstract the DVMs away. We can use the normie world to fuel our parallel economy, using distributed compute to provide services that people want and are willing to pay for them.
And it actually is easier to do it this way than trying to engineer your way around the restrictions. Why pay for 1000s of proxies if you can have 1000s of people participating in your pool of compute?
I'm building this in Q1 if all goes well, but I'm sharing the idea with the world because the important part is it gets built. If anyone wants to take the lead, participate or just brainstorm hit me up!
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Replies (10)
Yes. There is huge demand for residential proxies. We would be interested in working in this with you.
So we want to build this so the “control” layer each user’s vpn service communicates with the world via Nostr. Right ?
Napkin sketch. Control layer, where clients pay for, start, stop, and monitor is all via Nostr. Payment by lightning. actual VPN services will be provided by some kind of wire guard server running on each users’s computer
Really it is wire guard on both client and server with an overlay of some pretty simple management scripts that communicate with other clients and servers over relay
It’s such a great fit for Noster because it’s a relatively straightforward problem that has already been solved in a centralized manner and it’s really benefit from lightning as a payment model and the ability for anybody to serve up either a client or a server.
So to be clear, the “server” is the user in his or her home running the server software which provides a wireguard vpn service to the “client”.
And typically you might actually find that the “client” wants to connect to hundreds, or thousands Of servers. Because these are usually larger businesses that need to do a ton of scraping and need thousands of residential IP addresses.,
The server implementation, the one that will run on each users, home computer, Seems pretty straightforward to me. The user run some kind of lightweight application, maybe an electron app but of course that’s too heavyweight so whatever the new hotness is for Desktop applications. This launches, a wire guard process and a Noster process that is always looking for new clients. It offers client services with parameters for price, bandwidth limit, probably a bunch of other things, but not like a zillion things.
The client application will only be actually run by probably not more than a few hundred or thousand people in the world, organizations that really have demand for these these kind of proxies
Yes. There is huge demand for residential proxies. We would be interested in working in this with you.
So we want to build this so the “control” layer for each user’s VPN service communicates with the world via Nostr. Right?
Napkin sketch: Control layer, where clients pay for, start, stop, and monitor is all via Nostr. Payment by lightning. actual VPN services will be provided by some kind of wire guard server running on each users’s computer.
Really it is Wireguard on both client and server with an overlay of some pretty simple management scripts that communicate with other clients and servers over relays.
It’s such a great fit for Noster because it’s a relatively straightforward problem that has already been solved in a centralized manner and it will really benefit from lightning as a payment model and the ability for anybody to serve up either a client or a server.
So to be clear, the “server” is the user in his or her home running the"wireguard server" which provides a wireguard VPN services to "clients".
And typically you might actually find that the “client” wants to connect to hundreds, or thousands of servers. The demand for residential proxies is usualy only among businesses that need to do a ton of scraping and need thousands of residential IP addresses.,
The SERVER implementation, the one that will run on each user's home computer... seems pretty straightforward to me. The user run ssome kind of lightweight application, maybe an electron app (but of course that’s too heavyweight, so we use whatever the new hotness is for Desktop applications.) This desktop application launches a WIREGUARD SERVER PROCESS a Nosr process that is always looking for new clients. It offers client services ......with parameters for price, bandwidth limit, probably a bunch of other things, but not like a zillion things.
We can just study the existing centralized residential IP providers (I know them well) and see what our options are.
The CLIENT application will only be actually run by probably not more than a few hundred or thousand people in the world... organizations that really have demand for these these kind of proxies... which makes it YET ANOTHER great fit for nostr, because these are relatively SOPHISTICATED consumers who could probably be convinced to try it out if they realized it was cheaper or more efficient, or whatever.
The key is to not try to over-engineer this... we are talking about a couple thin layers on top of Wireguard and Nostr. I need to learn more about DVMs.
