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!
Replies (29)
{this is the way gif}
Lots of low hanging fruits and lots of work to be done. Looking forward to seeing how you tackle this! Thanks for pointing out the VPN aspect..
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!
View quoted note →
Sounds like
@Sovereign Engineering material .. consider!
There are plenty of companies doing this already and sell in bulk, ie. Residential IPs as a service. Almost like a “consensual” botnet
COULD BE THE MOVE
View quoted note →Would DVM act as a user and simply pull info one needs? One could also provide similar service for X (or any other paywalled site) e.g. I want to read some thread on X or pull last couple of posts from a specific account without having to open the app and login with a lurker account.
i'm not exactly sure what you mean with acting as user
💯
like a proxy user account of the platform. E.g. one cannot read from X without a user account.
👀
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!
View quoted note →
For anyone who wants to make this vision a reality, just know that carman built a WASM DVM a while ago. Could be useful
GitHub
GitHub - benthecarman/wasm-dvm
Contribute to benthecarman/wasm-dvm development by creating an account on GitHub.
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.
Yes, it’s a great fit for umbrel and start9
I know a guy that built a social media monitoring app by sending raspberry pies to his friends. He now has a fleet of PI's that do YT/reddit/tiktok searches and almost can not be detected as it's mixed in with regular web traffic
Cool stuff!
Another way it’s a great fit for Nostr Is that the server really needs to send constant updates via website to the client.
There is quite a lot of logic around, bandwidth limits and ping times.
Constant updates via websockets.
I can participate with my home server
Looking at DVMs. Might be the wrong abstraction because really what we want is to measure and price bandwidth. We don’t want to actually exchange money for data
One first step would be to take a quick look at any shitcoin projects which have tried to do this. I’m sure there are a few and obviously we don’t want to use their Blockchain stuff but they might have already solved what exactly the client in the server are supposed to do.
Incidentally, this is actually the ethical alternative to existing, centralized services. Because it’s an unspoken thing that when you’re using a centralized service, those residential IP’s are being served up by either computers which have malware or which are running applications which are secretly prostituting their users,l bandwidth.
I can help and I would participate regardless of using a vpn. I’d rather not download from google.
Followed
that would be a bit complicated flow - you'd generally want DVMs to run isolated, not with your user session. unless a dvm is a wrapper for X api of course
Fucking following
Dm’d
I love this idea from
@aljaz !
Making it easy for anyone to sell services (downloading content, accessing sites, etc) and resources (compute, bandwidth, storage) with just an Umbrel or home server is a HUGE opportunity.
(I've long loved the idea of rebuilding all of the shitcoins like helium golem, filecoin, etc with nostr/sats)
Who all is working on this or something analogous?
View quoted note →How can we ever recover with such a broken Internet?
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!
View quoted note →
